Jane Bennett holds a guest lecture on 'The ‘Phiz‘ of Walt Whitman'

A playful presentation of Walt Whitman’s poetic explorations of a sympathetic causality between, on the one hand, the posture of a body (its “phiz” or physical-physiognomic shape and style) and, on the other hand, its internally-experienced mood. Whitman’s depictions, in Leaves of Grass, of mimetic transmissions between phiz and mood contribute to his project of inducing a democratic self and society: a human being who is both capable of self-rule and affectionately disposed toward an egalitarian pluralism. The lecture explores several phiz-mood couplings in the poems, and then places Whitman’s body-mind experimentations in the contexts of 21st century research in embodied cognition theory and 19th century discussions of American phrenology.