Writing democracy
we’ve seen quite a few texts that could be said to be interested in the promotion of something like a democratic aesthetic—an art that will forward the project of an equalitarian, participatory politics by representing and responding to the needs of all different kinds of people. There are, of course, lots of different strategies for enacting such an idea; Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Apess, and Schoolcraft may have similar aims but very different approaches. Of these writers, which strike you as the most effective advocates for or theorists of democracy? What specific aspects of their work (in terms of form as well as content) lead you to your conclusions? Perhaps most importantly: what might the observers of the nineteenth-century American experiment have to offer us in the precarity of our current cultural moment?
