Pub Date : 2011-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00034.X
Steven Fink
The critical interest attending Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Man of the Crowd” has come largely in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay treating the Man of the Crowd and/or the narrator as the type of the flâneur, the desultory observer of the modern capitalist cityscape.1 Since then, it has become one of the more widely discussed and debated stories in the Poe canon. Yet while ambiguities and irresolution are clearly part of its modern appeal, I would argue that the story offers up more answers to its mysteries than have yet been acknowledged. The narrator of the story sits in a London coffeehouse observing, identifying, and classifying the passing crowds, until he is arrested by the sight of an old man and what he describes as “the absolute idiosyncracy [sic] of . . . expression” on his face (Works, 2:511).2 Unable to identify or categorize the old man, the narrator follows him through the streets of London until, after a full twenty-four hours of wandering, he finally abandons the vain attempt to comprehend the stranger. He asserts that the Man of the Crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime,” but he can penetrate the mystery no further and concludes with the remark with which he began his account, that “‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read” (Works, 2:515, 506). Poe scholars have tended to focus on the character of the narrator more than on the old man himself, and in doing so they have analyzed the various ways in which the narrator is limited, inadequate, or unreliable; yet they have tended to accept the narrator’s judgment that the old man and his crime must remain shrouded in mystery. J. Gerald Kennedy, for example, has argued that attention to the old man only obscures the real center of interest in the story, the narrator’s conflicting and irreconcilable modes of perception, and Kennedy concludes that “the man of the crowd retains the ultimate inscrutability of Melville’s white whale, symbolizing (if anything) man’s inability to ascertain, by means of reason, any absolute knowledge of the world beyond the self.”3 Similarly emphasizing the stranger’s inscrutability, Robert H. Byer writes, “Like an apparition in a dream, the old man seems to inhabit a world other than the narrator’s, one that the narrator cannot communicate with in ordinary ways yet that is ‘all-absorbing’ to him.”4 Stephen Rachman’s insightful reading of Poe’s story (which takes as foundational Benjamin’s essay on the flâneur and
{"title":"Who is Poe’s “Man of the Crowd”?","authors":"Steven Fink","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00034.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00034.X","url":null,"abstract":"The critical interest attending Edgar Allan Poe’s tale “The Man of the Crowd” has come largely in the wake of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay treating the Man of the Crowd and/or the narrator as the type of the flâneur, the desultory observer of the modern capitalist cityscape.1 Since then, it has become one of the more widely discussed and debated stories in the Poe canon. Yet while ambiguities and irresolution are clearly part of its modern appeal, I would argue that the story offers up more answers to its mysteries than have yet been acknowledged. The narrator of the story sits in a London coffeehouse observing, identifying, and classifying the passing crowds, until he is arrested by the sight of an old man and what he describes as “the absolute idiosyncracy [sic] of . . . expression” on his face (Works, 2:511).2 Unable to identify or categorize the old man, the narrator follows him through the streets of London until, after a full twenty-four hours of wandering, he finally abandons the vain attempt to comprehend the stranger. He asserts that the Man of the Crowd is “the type and the genius of deep crime,” but he can penetrate the mystery no further and concludes with the remark with which he began his account, that “‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—it does not permit itself to be read” (Works, 2:515, 506). Poe scholars have tended to focus on the character of the narrator more than on the old man himself, and in doing so they have analyzed the various ways in which the narrator is limited, inadequate, or unreliable; yet they have tended to accept the narrator’s judgment that the old man and his crime must remain shrouded in mystery. J. Gerald Kennedy, for example, has argued that attention to the old man only obscures the real center of interest in the story, the narrator’s conflicting and irreconcilable modes of perception, and Kennedy concludes that “the man of the crowd retains the ultimate inscrutability of Melville’s white whale, symbolizing (if anything) man’s inability to ascertain, by means of reason, any absolute knowledge of the world beyond the self.”3 Similarly emphasizing the stranger’s inscrutability, Robert H. Byer writes, “Like an apparition in a dream, the old man seems to inhabit a world other than the narrator’s, one that the narrator cannot communicate with in ordinary ways yet that is ‘all-absorbing’ to him.”4 Stephen Rachman’s insightful reading of Poe’s story (which takes as foundational Benjamin’s essay on the flâneur and","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"17 1","pages":"17 - 38"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81902041","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00026.X
J. Bowers
Edgar Allan Poe’s 200 th birthday meant big business for the retail and tourism industries. The popular clothing merchant Urban Outfitters marketed exclusive ladies’ T-shirts featuring quotations from “Alone” and “The Raven,” as well as a men’s “Edgar Allen Poe” [sic] tee emblazoned with a screen print of the author, framed by a reclining skeleton. All styles were, naturally, available in just one color—black. The U.S. Postal Service released a commemorative forty-two-cent portrait stamp, accompanied by a “limited edition commemorative copy” of “The Raven,” advertised with the less-than-catchy slogan “The Edgar Allan Poe Stamp: for Now, Not Nevermore.”1 And six American locales (Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Richmond, and Sullivan’s Island) attracted literary pilgrims wishing to celebrate Poe’s bicentennial in style. From a historical standpoint, it is not surprising that such a large number of locales would try to lay claim to the author’s legacy. Though it is difficult to accurately track every move that Poe made throughout his lifetime, he, his wife Virginia, and her mother Maria Clemm occupied numerous homes in several cities. Their home life included moves from Baltimore to Richmond, from Richmond to New York City, from there to Philadelphia, and back to New York City, with several intra-city relocations.2 Through these moves, Poe unwittingly studded the East Coast with homes, commemorative plaques, statues, and other monuments to his legacy. Unlike Mark Twain, whose boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, appears in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, or Henry David Thoreau, who penned Walden at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, Poe’s life and work elude obvious associations with a particular point-of-origin or “home.” That is to say, they foil the “pursuit of the writer by the reader,” resisting the literary pilgrim’s longing for “the communication between readers and writers, mediated through the house and the objects it contains.”3 Poe’s tales and poems often take place in fantastical, ambiguous locales, unconnected to any identifiable originals. The houses he once occupied, now museums, feature few, if any, objects that belonged to Poe or his family—most of his personal effects were lost or sold during his many moves.
埃德加·爱伦·坡的200岁生日意味着零售业和旅游业的大生意。颇受欢迎的服装商人Urban Outfitters推出了印有《Alone》和《The Raven》语录的独家女士t恤，以及印有《埃德加·爱伦·坡》(Edgar Allen Poe)字样的男士t恤，t恤上印着爱伦·坡的丝网版画，边框上是一具斜倚着的骨架。当然，所有款式都只有一种颜色——黑色。美国邮政总局发行了一枚42美分的肖像纪念邮票，附有一枚“限量版纪念邮票”《渡鸦》，广告上写着一句不太吸引人的口号:“埃德加·爱伦·坡邮票:现在，不是永远。”6个美国地方(巴尔的摩、费城、波士顿、纽约、里士满和沙利文岛)吸引了希望以独特的方式庆祝坡200周年诞辰的文学朝圣者。从历史的角度来看，如此多的地方试图声称拥有作者的遗产并不奇怪。虽然很难准确地追踪坡一生的每一个举动，但他、他的妻子弗吉尼亚和她的母亲玛丽亚·克莱姆在几个城市住过许多家。他们的家庭生活包括从巴尔的摩搬到里士满，从里士满搬到纽约市，从那里搬到费城，再回到纽约市，其中有几次在城市内部搬迁通过这些行动，坡不知不觉地在东海岸布满了住宅、纪念牌、雕像和其他纪念他遗产的纪念碑。马克·吐温在《汤姆·索亚历险记》和《哈克贝利·芬历险记》中都有他童年的故乡密苏里州汉尼拔，亨利·大卫·梭罗在《马萨诸塞州康科德的瓦尔登湖》中写了《瓦尔登湖》，而坡的生活和作品与某个特定的原点或“家”没有明显的联系。也就是说，它们挫败了“读者对作家的追求”，抵制了文学朝圣者对“读者和作家之间的交流”的渴望，这种交流是通过房子和它所包含的物品来中介的。爱伦·坡的故事和诗歌常常发生在幻想的、模棱两可的地方，与任何可识别的原作者都没有联系。他曾经住过的房子现在变成了博物馆，里面几乎没有属于爱伦·坡或他家人的物品——他的大部分私人物品都在多次搬家中丢失或被卖掉了。
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Pub Date : 2010-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00027.X
Douglas W. Lind
A fter appearing in at least thirteen different American publications from February to May 1845 [Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, “Edgar Allan Poe–The Raven,” http://eapoe.org/works/info/pp073.htm (accessed 9 June 2010)], “The Raven” crossed the Atlantic, appearing in the 14 June 1845 issue of the Critic of London [148]. It did not emerge again in a publication of that country until early 1846 with the London edition of The Raven and Other Poems (hereinafter RAOP) [Charles F. Heartman and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe . . . , rev. ed. (Hattiesburg, MS: Book Farm, 1943), 103; also see Works, 1:359– 64, 578–82]. Shortly thereafter, the London Athenaeum reprinted the poem in its entirety within a generally negative review of RAOP in its 28 February 1846 issue [215–16]. Elizabeth Barrett claimed in an April 1846 letter to Poe that the poem “produced a sensation, a ‘fit horror’ ” [see The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: AMS Press, 1965), 17:229]. Perhaps she was merely exaggerating the poem’s effect as a polite means of thanking Poe for dedicating RAOP to her, but assuming it did indeed create a “fit horror,” such a public reaction would had to have been the result of reprinting the poem in widely circulated magazines in addition to the limited number of copies of RAOP. Furthermore, the poem would have had to appear in a widely distributed periodical with a target audience of intellectual English ladies to reach the members of Elizabeth Barrett’s social group in sufficient number to cause such a stir. Curiously, then, at the date of her letter, the Critic and the Athenaeum are the only two recorded British periodicals that carried the text of the poem. Because the Critic version had been out for almost a year and the
1845年2月至5月，《乌鸦》出现在至少13种不同的美国出版物上[巴尔的摩埃德加·爱伦·坡协会，《埃德加·爱伦·坡-乌鸦》http://eapoe.org/works/info/pp073.htm(2010年6月9日访问)]，《乌鸦》跨过大西洋，出现在1845年6月14日的《伦敦评论家》上[148]。直到1846年初，它才再次出现在该国的出版物中，伦敦版的《乌鸦和其他诗歌》(以下简称《RAOP》)[查尔斯·f·哈特曼和詹姆斯·r·坎尼，埃德加·爱伦·坡作品初版参考书目]。，修订版(哈蒂斯堡，MS: Book Farm, 1943)， 103;也见《著作》，1:359 - 64,578 - 82]。此后不久，《伦敦雅典娜》在1846年2月28日的一期杂志上重印了这首诗的全文，对RAOP进行了普遍的负面评论[215-16]。伊丽莎白·巴雷特在1846年4月给爱伦·坡的一封信中声称，这首诗“引起了轰动，‘令人毛骨悚然’”[见《爱伦·坡全集》(纽约:AMS出版社，1965)，17:229]。也许她只是夸张了这首诗的效果，作为一种礼貌的方式来感谢爱伦·坡把《RAOP》献给她，但假设这首诗确实制造了一种“合适的恐怖”，那么这样的公众反应一定是由于在广泛传播的杂志上转载了这首诗，而《RAOP》的发行量也有限。此外，这首诗必须刊登在一份以英国知识分子女士为目标受众的广泛发行的期刊上，才能在伊丽莎白·巴雷特所在的社会群体中引起足够多的反响。奇怪的是，在她写信的时候，《批评家》和《雅典娜》是仅有的两家有记录的英国期刊，刊载了这首诗的文本。因为评论家版已经出版快一年了
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Pub Date : 2010-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00029.X
J. Edwards
The gothic has crept into every aspect of American literary and cultural studies, from analyses of Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to readings of Stephenie Meyer’s seemingly endless Twilight saga. Not only does the gothic have the power to convey social and cultural taboos (incest in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland), or the brutality of tyrants to victims (slavery and rape in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), or the spectres of history (the ghost of Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved), or internal psychological traumas (doppelgangers in Poe’s “William Wilson” [1839]). The gothic also has the power to—as Teresa Goddu elegantly puts it—“haunt back” [Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 128 and elsewhere]. The return of the repressed, the revenge of the unvanquished, the revenant who refuses to remain buried—all of these tropes move the U.S. gothic from internal psychological spaces and fantastic supernatural realms into the public political domains of Native land claims, restitution for slavery, and equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians. The manner in which these hauntings manifest themselves in political discourses and textual practices is extended in chronological terms by Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm’s Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. Ranging from “Usher” (1839) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1973), Perry and Sederholm find in what they call Poe’s “masterpiece” [vii] a set of literary themes that traverse stylistic, generic, and temporal boundaries— exerting certain dark influences on the literary future. In addition to treating Poe’s story at length, this book provides textual interpretations of works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, as well as such films as Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby. For readers interested in viewing these texts through the lens of “Usher,” Perry and Sederholm’s study will be a useful guide. It is important to see, as the authors insist, how Poe’s writing seeps into literary works grounded in a range of textual practices, from psychological horror and ghost stories to weird and haunting tales to uncanny narratives and even slasher films. In all of these forms, Perry and Sederholm perceive Poe as a gothic forefather, and they read
哥特文学已经渗透到美国文学和文化研究的方方面面，从对cramevecoeur的《一个美国农民的来信》(1782)的分析到对Stephenie Meyer看似无穷无尽的暮光之城传奇的阅读。哥特不仅有能力传达社会和文化禁忌(查尔斯·布罗克登·布朗1798年的《维兰》中的乱伦)，或者暴君对受害者的残暴(哈里特·雅各布斯1861年的《女奴生活中的事件》中的奴隶制和强奸)，或者历史的幽灵(托妮·莫里森1987年的《宠儿》中的鬼魂)，或者内心的心理创伤(爱伦·波《威廉·威尔逊》[1839]中的二重身)。哥特风格还有一种力量——正如特蕾莎·高杜优雅地指出的那样——“萦绕在人们的脑海”[哥特美国:叙事、历史和民族(纽约:哥伦比亚大学出版社，1997)，128页及其他地方]。被压迫者的回归，未被征服者的复仇，拒绝被埋葬的亡魂——所有这些比喻都将美国哥特式从内部心理空间和奇妙的超自然领域转移到公共政治领域，包括土著土地要求，奴隶制的恢复，以及妇女、同性恋者的平等权利。丹尼斯·r·佩里(Dennis R. Perry)和卡尔·h·塞德霍尔姆(Carl H. Sederholm)的爱伦·坡的《厄舍之家》(The House of Usher)和《美国哥特式》(American Gothic)按时间顺序扩展了这些幽灵在政治话语和文本实践中表现出来的方式。从《亚瑟》(1839)到斯蒂芬·金的《闪灵》(1973)，佩里和塞德霍尔姆在他们所谓的坡的“杰作”中发现了一系列跨越风格、一般和时间界限的文学主题——对文学的未来产生了某种黑暗的影响。除了对坡的故事进行详尽的分析，这本书还对夏洛特·帕金斯·吉尔曼、亨利·詹姆斯、h·p·洛夫克拉夫特、雪莉·杰克逊和斯蒂芬·金的作品以及《惊魂记》和《罗斯玛丽的婴儿》等电影进行了文本解读。对于有兴趣通过《亚瑟小子》的视角来看待这些文本的读者来说，佩里和塞德霍尔姆的研究将是一个有用的指南。正如两位作者所坚持的那样，坡的写作是如何渗透到一系列文本实践的文学作品中去的，从心理恐怖和鬼故事到怪异和令人难以忘怀的故事，再到离奇的叙事，甚至是血腥电影，这一点很重要。在所有这些形式中，佩里和塞德霍尔姆都认为坡是哥特的鼻祖，他们阅读
{"title":"Usher’s Afterlives; or, Textual Travels with Poe","authors":"J. Edwards","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00029.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00029.X","url":null,"abstract":"The gothic has crept into every aspect of American literary and cultural studies, from analyses of Crévecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to readings of Stephenie Meyer’s seemingly endless Twilight saga. Not only does the gothic have the power to convey social and cultural taboos (incest in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland), or the brutality of tyrants to victims (slavery and rape in Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), or the spectres of history (the ghost of Toni Morrison’s 1987 Beloved), or internal psychological traumas (doppelgangers in Poe’s “William Wilson” [1839]). The gothic also has the power to—as Teresa Goddu elegantly puts it—“haunt back” [Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1997), 128 and elsewhere]. The return of the repressed, the revenge of the unvanquished, the revenant who refuses to remain buried—all of these tropes move the U.S. gothic from internal psychological spaces and fantastic supernatural realms into the public political domains of Native land claims, restitution for slavery, and equal rights for women, gays, and lesbians. The manner in which these hauntings manifest themselves in political discourses and textual practices is extended in chronological terms by Dennis R. Perry and Carl H. Sederholm’s Poe, “The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. Ranging from “Usher” (1839) to Stephen King’s The Shining (1973), Perry and Sederholm find in what they call Poe’s “masterpiece” [vii] a set of literary themes that traverse stylistic, generic, and temporal boundaries— exerting certain dark influences on the literary future. In addition to treating Poe’s story at length, this book provides textual interpretations of works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry James, H. P. Lovecraft, Shirley Jackson, and Stephen King, as well as such films as Psycho and Rosemary’s Baby. For readers interested in viewing these texts through the lens of “Usher,” Perry and Sederholm’s study will be a useful guide. It is important to see, as the authors insist, how Poe’s writing seeps into literary works grounded in a range of textual practices, from psychological horror and ghost stories to weird and haunting tales to uncanny narratives and even slasher films. In all of these forms, Perry and Sederholm perceive Poe as a gothic forefather, and they read","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"1 1","pages":"100 - 103"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88867921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00028.X
C. L. Cassagnère
{"title":"“A Fine Tangled Web-Work”: Revisiting Poe's Prose Henri Justin. Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose","authors":"C. L. Cassagnère","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00028.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00028.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"27 1","pages":"93-99"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89463396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00025.X
Matthew H. Pangborn
February 1845 proving a dull month for fashion, Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book decided to forego its usual illustrations of the latest designs. It did offer, however, the account of a woman strangled to death by her husband after an argument over a bustle. As the wife’s name was Scheherazade and the author’s Edgar Allan Poe, it is unlikely any of the magazine’s fashionable female readers feared their own worst nightmares had been realized. Yet if “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” treats a topic less sensationalistic than an actual murder, it does explore public anxieties just as powerful, ones arising in the phenomenon of orientalism reaching its peak in the United States in the 1840s. Recent readings, especially of Poe’s “Ligeia” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” have examined the author’s engagement with an oriental discourse that has proven more complicated than the mere escapism or expression of everyday wisdom it was often taken to be during the period.1 According to such studies, orientalism allowed its participants to partake of “a powerful, colonial, national identity, one which linked the country with the ethnocentrism of post-Enlightenment Euroamerican culture.”2 No study of Poe’s “Scheherazade,” however, has commented on the author’s use of the discourse to mount an elaborate double parody of that national identity’s central myth, and none has studied the author’s decision to address a largely female readership through a woman narrator who is violently garroted.3 But if Poe’s story tracks the enlistment of the oriental tale in discursive attempts to construct a safe domestic space for European Americans, it also calculates the cost of that construction for both European Americans and their others. Poe’s narrator asserts from the start that there is more truth than pleasure to his tale—a truth about European Americans, not “orientals”—but it is a truth he also expects his audience will find too painful to believe.4 Poe’s story takes the form of an epilogue to the Near Eastern and Indian folktales of The Thousand and One Nights, which was introduced to the West through Antoine Galland’s French translation (1704–17) but quickly brought out in English by Grub Street hacks. Scheherazade, the original folktales’
{"title":"The Arabian Romance of America in Poe’s “Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”","authors":"Matthew H. Pangborn","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00025.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00025.X","url":null,"abstract":"February 1845 proving a dull month for fashion, Godey’s Magazine and Lady’s Book decided to forego its usual illustrations of the latest designs. It did offer, however, the account of a woman strangled to death by her husband after an argument over a bustle. As the wife’s name was Scheherazade and the author’s Edgar Allan Poe, it is unlikely any of the magazine’s fashionable female readers feared their own worst nightmares had been realized. Yet if “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” treats a topic less sensationalistic than an actual murder, it does explore public anxieties just as powerful, ones arising in the phenomenon of orientalism reaching its peak in the United States in the 1840s. Recent readings, especially of Poe’s “Ligeia” and “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” have examined the author’s engagement with an oriental discourse that has proven more complicated than the mere escapism or expression of everyday wisdom it was often taken to be during the period.1 According to such studies, orientalism allowed its participants to partake of “a powerful, colonial, national identity, one which linked the country with the ethnocentrism of post-Enlightenment Euroamerican culture.”2 No study of Poe’s “Scheherazade,” however, has commented on the author’s use of the discourse to mount an elaborate double parody of that national identity’s central myth, and none has studied the author’s decision to address a largely female readership through a woman narrator who is violently garroted.3 But if Poe’s story tracks the enlistment of the oriental tale in discursive attempts to construct a safe domestic space for European Americans, it also calculates the cost of that construction for both European Americans and their others. Poe’s narrator asserts from the start that there is more truth than pleasure to his tale—a truth about European Americans, not “orientals”—but it is a truth he also expects his audience will find too painful to believe.4 Poe’s story takes the form of an epilogue to the Near Eastern and Indian folktales of The Thousand and One Nights, which was introduced to the West through Antoine Galland’s French translation (1704–17) but quickly brought out in English by Grub Street hacks. Scheherazade, the original folktales’","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"71 1","pages":"35 - 57"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80038976","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2010-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00024.X
Christina L Zwarg
A s we turn to the question of pain in Poe, we might return to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, which describes how effectively his mother’s stories drained away all of his morbid symptoms.1 Given the relief attributed to the “vigorous current” of those tales, we could ask if the current coursing through Poe’s work also targets some feverish pain abroad in the land of his upbringing. Many scholars now find Poe’s engagement with painful issues of his day undeniable, particularly as they relate to traumas of slavery and the racism driving imperialism at home and abroad. Yet those same scholars continue to debate how to interpret that engagement, particularly when it takes the indirect, ghoulish, and splenetic form so characteristic of his work. If some still question whether Poe was a racist, most assume that some degree or kind of racism was unavoidable for a man of his time. While initially useful, efforts to pinpoint Poe’s position on the spectrum of racist ideologies of his day have been superseded by recognition that his writing constitutes an archive with broad implications for an anatomy of racism’s conflicted and contested operations.2 Poe exposes slavery’s impact well beyond the experience of its most immediate victims and perpetrators, and this extended traumatic environment generates a range of response whose effects are worth studying with care. This last is particularly the case when we discover how often the vigorous currents of Poe’s work invite us to consider the broader traumatic relays alive in their very production. Thus if we consider the deeper resonances of Benjamin’s association between storytelling and pain, we may find another way to approach some of the
{"title":"Vigorous Currents, Painful Archives: The Production of Affect and History in Poe’s “Tale of the Ragged Mountains”","authors":"Christina L Zwarg","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00024.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2010.00024.X","url":null,"abstract":"A s we turn to the question of pain in Poe, we might return to Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, which describes how effectively his mother’s stories drained away all of his morbid symptoms.1 Given the relief attributed to the “vigorous current” of those tales, we could ask if the current coursing through Poe’s work also targets some feverish pain abroad in the land of his upbringing. Many scholars now find Poe’s engagement with painful issues of his day undeniable, particularly as they relate to traumas of slavery and the racism driving imperialism at home and abroad. Yet those same scholars continue to debate how to interpret that engagement, particularly when it takes the indirect, ghoulish, and splenetic form so characteristic of his work. If some still question whether Poe was a racist, most assume that some degree or kind of racism was unavoidable for a man of his time. While initially useful, efforts to pinpoint Poe’s position on the spectrum of racist ideologies of his day have been superseded by recognition that his writing constitutes an archive with broad implications for an anatomy of racism’s conflicted and contested operations.2 Poe exposes slavery’s impact well beyond the experience of its most immediate victims and perpetrators, and this extended traumatic environment generates a range of response whose effects are worth studying with care. This last is particularly the case when we discover how often the vigorous currents of Poe’s work invite us to consider the broader traumatic relays alive in their very production. Thus if we consider the deeper resonances of Benjamin’s association between storytelling and pain, we may find another way to approach some of the","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"52 1","pages":"33 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87957398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00020.X
Kent P. Ljungquist
Even critics and scholars disposed to acknowledge Poe’s signal achievements—his contributions to the gothic tradition, his pioneering efforts in the short-tale genre, and his impact on the Aesthetic and Symbolist movements—have sometimes been tepid in their evaluations of his prose style. While Brett Zimmerman does, in his illuminating study, quote or mention most of what he calls Poe’s most “censorious inquisitors,” including Mark Twain, Henry James, Yvor Winters, T. S. Eliot, Julian Symons, and Harold Bloom, he does not engage in a point-by-point refutation. The tone throughout this examination of stylistic and rhetorical strategies is affirmative rather than defensive: Zimmerman convincingly argues that Poe’s prose is more varied and nuanced than his detractors claim by highlighting the way he matches language to the agitated moods, manias, and obsessions of his characters. Previous commentators, to be sure, have anticipated Zimmerman’s general point, but the painstaking demonstration of his thesis through five thoroughly detailed chapters—supported by an extensive catalog of Poe’s rhetorical devices—adds rich texture to his overall argument and advances our understanding of several key works in the Poe canon. It may not strike readers as original to pair for analysis, as Zimmerman does in his second chapter, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” a linkage that invites examination of two deranged narrators who appear to use reason to defend horrific acts. But Zimmerman’s essential distinction between the outer-directed appeal of the speaker in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” reflecting an attempt to persuade an audience, and the more inner-directed rhetoric of the narrator in “The Black Cat” seems valid. The latter narrator appears to struggle to convince himself that there is a natural set of reasons for what transpires in the tale. His repeated recourse to the language of folklore, religion, and the supernatural suggests a growing internal terror that belies his indirect or defensive references to witches and his denial of demonic agency. Contrary to interpretations of the tale that view the references to superstitions and nightmares about cats and devils as window dressing or gothic cliché, Zimmerman
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Pub Date : 2009-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00017.X
Jeffrey A. Savoye
{"title":"Examining Poe's Critical Theory STUART LEVINE AND SUSAN F. LEVINE, EDS., Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory, the Major Documents","authors":"Jeffrey A. Savoye","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00017.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00017.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"26 1","pages":"113-129"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90705181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2009-10-01DOI: 10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00016.X
A. Hammond
{"title":"Poe's Letters Redux JOHN WARD OSTROM, BURTON R. POLLIN, AND JEFFREY A. SAVOYE, EDS., The Collected Letters of Edgar Allan Poe","authors":"A. Hammond","doi":"10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00016.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1947-4697.2009.00016.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"13 1","pages":"100-112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2009-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78950665","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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