Mary K. Donahue
Whitman versus Tooker-Who Lives in Magical Reality?
Presently we will already be very familiar with the opinions of Thoreau and Emerson, and we will have delved deeply into our ideas of society’s effect on us. It is time to take a look at two artists who make their views about society apparentand both look at it in a negative light (at least in the pieces we will be studying here). The students can be given short backgrounds on Whitman and Tooker, or not, but in any case they must be informed that they created their art during different time periods.
Objectives:
Students Will:
Demonstrate the ability to paraphrase
Apply knowledge of literary and artistic devices to discuss both the poem and the painting
Make connections between the two pieces
Assessment:
Participation, Paraphrasing (which will be checked for completion and understanding of basic ideas), essay
Activity:
The students will be asked to break into pairs. After this is done, they will be given the poem
‘I Sit and Look Out’
by Walt Whitman. They will be asked to paraphrase the poem line by line. (Essentially, they are being asked to put the poem into their own words, to ensure that they both understand the literal, figurative and abstract meanings that the artist has intended.) During this time, it is important that the teacher circulate to aid in comprehension, and to check that each pair is working. After they complete the paraphrasing, the group will come together as a whole and discuss the discoveries they made during reading in pairs. This will give all the students a chance to level out their understanding before they are asked to apply it to a more abstract form, which is viewing the painting
The Subway
by George Tooker. The class will then ‘read’ the painting, essentially paraphrasing it and attempting to understand what the artist was attempting to convey. After discussing how the two pieces relate, the students will be assigned a two-page, formal essay in which they answer the following questions: Is society a good or bad thing? Refer specifically to these two pieces of art, or anything we’ve read by Emerson (
Nature, Self-Reliance, American Scholar, Fate)
or Thoreau (
Civil Disobedience, Walden)
in your defense of yourself. Hopefully the students will get that the connection between Tooker and Whitman is their critical view on society. They both present works of art that comment on the confusion and loneliness that individuals may feel when swallowed up by society.
Breaking the students into pairs at first will allow them to get comfortable working with the piece because they are not being asked to formulate a view on their own. Coming back together and discussing the discoveries that they have made will ensure that everyone understands the concepts that Whitman was attempting to convey. Bringing in the painting now is ideal because it mirrors a lot of the same sentiment in a more basic way. This will allow the students to see how two different media convey the same message, in two completely different time periods. The hope is that this will allow the students to view conformist society in a negative light, only because of the problems it is often apt to cause. The assignment of the essay will allow the students to choose their perspective to argue, while staying grounded in the work, so that they can feel supported no matter what. It is my hope that fairly equal numbers of students will choose to write for and against, therefore I can see that they are keeping an open mind and looking at both sides of the coin. Hopefully, if the turnout is good and the quality of the papers is high, I would like the students to share them with one another at a later class.