Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation最新文献

{"title":"Outside Dupin’s Closet of Reason: (Homo)sexual Repression and Racialized Terror in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”","authors":"Courtney L. Novosat","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2012.00047.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2012.00047.X","url":null,"abstract":"Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the first of his selftermed “ratiocinative tales,” has long been credited with originating the genre of detective fiction. Like many sui generis works and perhaps with particular occasion because of Poe’s preoccupation with the method of fiction writing, “Rue Morgue” begins with a self-reflexive discussion of its own method. Rather than opening by delving into a crime in medias res or exploring the remains of a crime scene like its contemporary descendants, “Rue Morgue” begins with a meditation on the method of analysis that will become a significant feature of the genre.1 Poe’s insistence that we discourse with him about analytic method as well as the slippage between authorial and narratorial voice he writes into the tale’s beginning, I suggest, is pivotal to a more significant and overlooked feature of the work—that is, how its production of mystery, largely dependent on an interpellated participatory reader,2 denies the tale a stable resolution. Despite the offered resolution of both crime and narrative, the central terror for the shrewd reader of “Rue Morgue” is that the text remains unresolved or, perhaps, unsettled. Juxtaposing narrative to counternarrative and even pitting clue against clew, for the participatory reader the narrative is indeterminate despite its resolution. As the tale alternately aligns the analyses by reader, writer, narrator, and Dupin with or against each other, indeterminacy becomes the tale’s raison d’etre, its manner of producing mystery and evoking terror. Even Poe’s resolution of his opening discourse on analysis— that “it will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic”—gives primacy to fancy and imagination as a condition of analytic thought (PT, 400). In this way, from the tale’s outset, Poe’s focus on the analytic process draws the reader’s attention not to the crime, not to the resolution, but to the act of analysis—to the reader’s","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"303 1","pages":"106 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2012-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74384576","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}

{"title":"Change and Transformation: Voyaging with Poe and Alexander von Humboldt","authors":"R. Scholnick","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00038.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00038.X","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"2004 1","pages":"89 - 96"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88914824","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}

{"title":"Movements in the Hollow Coffin: On “The Fall of the House of Usher”","authors":"M. Steven","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00033.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00033.X","url":null,"abstract":"An irrational belief that the dead may return to haunt the living is part of “the uncanny,” a psychical phenomenon whose theory Sigmund Freud adapts (from Ernst Jentsch) to describe “the perceptible reanimation of something familiar that has been repressed.” “The writer,” Freud argues, brings us “in relation to spirits, demons, and ghosts” by “not letting us know whether he is taking us into the real world or into a purely fantastic one of his own creation.”1 If psychoanalytic theory holds that literature is manifestly a haunted medium, then perhaps a productive intersection could be staged between Freud’s uncanny and Jacques Derrida’s “hauntology”— between psychical phenomena and a critical program that “supplants its nearhomonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive.”2 The literary figure of this conjunction would best be described as “undead”—and, by reading an exemplarily haunted work of literature with these two theories in mind, I want to propose some ideas for what I am going to call “the undeath of the author.” To begin with a concession: Edgar Allan Poe is done to death. While the flesh-and-blood Poe met his physical end over 160 years ago—done in by either alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, drugs, heart disease, rabies, suicide, or tuberculosis—similarly myriad scholars have dissected his literary corpus with all the critical tools provided them, and by doing so they have turned out a variety of different Poes. Scott Peeples describes a handful in the preface to his indispensible Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (2004): “the romantic Southern outcast, the patron saint of the French symbolists, the hack, the test case for Freudian psychoanlysis, the proto-deconstructionist, the racist, the antiracist, and so on.”3 Achieving metaphorical quintessence, then, a profusion of that scholarship has been deeply indebted to Roland Barthes’s seminal essay “Death of the Author” (1967). Within this context, the most famous work to be influenced by Barthes—Joseph Riddel’s 1979 essay “The ‘Crypt’ of Edgar Poe”—argues that, in Poe’s tales, “images of nature are already metonymic substitutions for words—or substitutions for substitutions,” and that Poe’s “realm of dreams” is in fact the “realm of language.”4 It is thus that Poe has","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"5 1","pages":"15 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79170280","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}

{"title":"Poe’s “Body Poetics”: Between “Theory” and Russian Formalism","authors":"O. Polovinkina","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00039.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00039.X","url":null,"abstract":"This book has two “protagonists”: Edgar Allan Poe and “theory.” Literary theory arrived late to Russia and became widespread only ten years ago or so, by which time Terry Eagleton had proclaimed Western literary criticism to be “after theory.” Still, Russian studies undertaken with real knowledge of “theory” are very few; some supposedly theoretical works referred to as “phenomenological” are actually quite traditional in thought and method. But such is not the case with this contribution by Alexandra Urakova. She is deeply in love with the sophisticated ideas of Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Genette, and others. And love brings knowledge. Urakova’s starting point is a phenomenological preoccupation with le corps propre, the bodysubject that “can make itself known contrary to the notions produced by the culture” [11; all translations are mine]. Hence her semiotic approach differs in general from Judith Butler’s, which emphasizes the hidden significance of politics, as well as from Peter Brooks’s, which investigates mostly the sexual body. She chooses to follow Jean Starobinski and focus on the body in its relation to writing. Also following Roland Barthes, Urakova aims to show the function of the body in the construction of narrative. Not narratological in the proper sense (though developed with the diegetic nature of the texts in mind), her study deals with “narrative bodies” displaying the power and limits of representation. [See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993); Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1993); Jean Starobinski, “L’Echelle des températures: Lecture du corps dans Madame Bovary,” in Le Temps de la réflexion (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); and Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974)]. From the traditional point of view, Poe is an unsuitable subject for this kind of critical inquiry. His reputation as a “spiritual writer” (Daniel Hoffman), as “the patron saint of French symbolists” (Scott Peeples), deters a consideration of his prose in corporeal terms. [See Hoffman, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1998), 256; and Scott Peeples, The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 436).]","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"155 1","pages":"100 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86296983","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}

{"title":"Writing and Reception in Antebellum America","authors":"P. Phillips","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00040.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00040.X","url":null,"abstract":"In this latest of his publications, James L. Machor, Professor of English at Kansas State University, builds upon his previous research on nineteenthcentury American literature, readers, and reception theory—Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response (1993), Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2000), and New Directions in American Reception Study (2008). As its title announces, Machor’s new study examines ways in which readers received, read, and interpreted works of antebellum American fiction. In doing so, the study considers what it meant to be an “informed reader” of literature during a historical period distinguished by the prominence of literary magazines, and it explores the implications of reception theory, including “historical hermeneutics,” in its detailed treatments of the works and literary historical contexts of four representative, but not equally well-known, American authors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Catharine Sedgwick, and Caroline Chesebro’. The book, which is written for an academic audience at the graduate level or above, gives as much attention to reception theory as it does to the critical analysis of the works, their contemporary reception, and their interpretation in the antebellum era and later. Machor aims to elucidate the complex relationship of the authors with their reading public, and the reading strategies and practices that inform and influence our own readings of those authors and their audience. Machor divides his study into two major sections. Part 1 defines and explores the significance of “historical hermeneutics,” reception theory, and conventions of reading in antebellum America as well as prevailing interpretive strategies that constitute what Machor calls “informed reading” during the period. Part 2 applies the theoretical and critical approaches enumerated in part 1 to the works of Poe, Melville, Sedgwick, and Chesebro’, taking into account the critical reception of those authors’ works as well as their responses to published reviews of their works. The book closes with a consideration of the ongoing implications of reception studies, especially “historical hermeneutics,” with respect to current approaches to genre theory and nineteenth-century American literary history.","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"19 1","pages":"101 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00040.X","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72540253","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}

{"title":"Revisiting the Nineteenth-Century Poe Controversies","authors":"John E. Martin","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00041.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00041.X","url":null,"abstract":"This article reviews the book \"Poe in His Own time: A Biographical Chronicle of his Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates,\" edited by Benjamin F. Fisher, published by the University of Iowa Press, 2010.","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"41 1","pages":"106 - 114"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78984180","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}

{"title":"Whose/Who's Ligeia?","authors":"R. D. Prospo","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00036.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00036.X","url":null,"abstract":"Theorizing gender frees female and male from somatic determination for semiotic freeplay. Of course this is real work, of course a lot more work is still to be done. But I want here to leap over the theorizing of gender to the theorizing of the theorizing of gender—to make a problem not of gender within human being but of human being within which gender is differentiated. This puts into question not that most traditional of binary oppositions within human being, at least not directly, but human being, itself, the grand hypostatizing that grounds all the sciences of man. And this requires positing an Other whose semiotic companionship with human being would be analogous to that of female and male within human being. Now, when “posthuman” is increasingly being thrown around in articles in PMLA, and Microsoft’s Jaron Lanier, the first contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent forum on “the defining idea of the next decade,” replies “The End of Human Specialness,”1 can a different reading of Poe’s “Ligeia” help to conceive an other-than-human being, an entity within which the differentiation between two genders might","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"49 1","pages":"57-68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75812509","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}

{"title":"Sovereign Authority and the Democratic Subject in Poe","authors":"R. Rodriguez","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00035.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00035.X","url":null,"abstract":"Edgar Allan Poe’s work records in mock horror what he perceives as the passing of old-style Republicanism and the emergence of popular democracy in Jacksonian America. The fear that the federal state would be “a government of people, not states,” loomed in the imagination of an elite to which Poe aspired, as the buffer zones the wealthy and powerful had erected to distance themselves from the encroaching masses seemed to be eroding.1 For instance, “Four Beasts in One—The Homo-Cameleopard,” his satire of Jacksonian democracy set in “the flourishing times of the Roman Empire” (PT, 181),2 depicts a decadent society addicted to bread and circus. The emperor, a parody of Jackson, turns into a sideshow monstrosity, the titular four beasts in one, fleeing a screeching mob and taking refuge in the Coliseum, where a spectacle is staged in his honor.3 For Poe, popular democracy is the constitutive obverse of absolute power, a perverted form of sovereignty made possible by the constitution of the masses through the leveling of social hierarchies and the fusing of disparate affects in spectacles and other forms of mass communication, the product of which he reflects back to his audience in the satirical figure of the bestial Jackson.4 The image of the sovereign taking refuge from the mob that authorizes its power by entering a spectacle of mass entertainment fuses sovereign authority and the people in a loop of enjoyment, like a dog—or better yet, a homo-cameleopard—chasing its own tail. Poe’s point is clear: so long as the State and the source of its authority are indistinguishable, there is no way to check the excesses of sovereign power, or what amounts to the same thing, the tyranny of the One (democracy’s numerical majority consolidated in the State) over the few. Inverting the traditional criticism of abusive state power, Poe depicts the sovereign as devoid of authority, subject to the whims of a multitude hungry for the next spectacle. That is why there is nowhere for Jackson to run but into the precarious safety of the Coliseum, where the wild adulation of the masses just as easily can turn against him.5 We might dismiss Poe’s satire of populist democracy as the fantasy of an aspiring elite bemoaning the breakdown of social hierarchies and traditional values, but in doing so we overlook a serious opposition to the inclusion of life in democratic","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"24 1","pages":"39 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78961116","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}

{"title":"Reconsidering Poe’s “Rationale of Verse”","authors":"Christopher Aruffo","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00037.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00037.X","url":null,"abstract":"Edgar Allan Poe’s essay “The Rationale of Verse” has been ill-treated. A rationale is a “an explanation or exposition of controlling principles (as of an opinion, belief, practice, or phenomenon),” 1 and Poe’s essay attempts to explain the controlling principles of poetry—including all traditions, across all languages, throughout all history. In writing his “Rationale,” however, Poe disputed scholarly wisdom that had been established for centuries, and the science of his time offered no support. Lacking empirical evidence, Poe made claims from his own intuition and argued from examples and anecdotes. “The Rationale of Verse” was repeatedly rejected before its publication and has since been alternately ignored, scorned, and reviled for its “bluffing and shoddy scholarship.” 2 However, recent research in both linguistics and psychology holds the promise of legitimizing Poe’s theories. Additionally, Stuart Levine and Susan Levine’s recent edition Critical Theory: The Major Documents offers a new and exhaustive analysis of “Rationale,” providing us with the occasion to look again at this text. Given what we now know, Poe’s thesis may be extracted and reexamined, allowing us to see “The Rationale of Verse” as an important component of his critical theory. “The Rationale of Verse” is intended as a technical manual for prosodic practice, as Poe makes clear in its fourth paragraph:","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"59 1","pages":"69 - 86"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84465017","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}

{"title":"Poe in the Marketplace: Making Sense of Reprinting","authors":"A. Hammond","doi":"10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00042.X","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/J.1754-6095.2011.00042.X","url":null,"abstract":"This review involves a recent but relatively unnoticed contribution to the scholarship on Poe’s writing relative to the nineteenth-century literary marketplace: Jonathan Hartmann’s 2008 The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe. The ongoing evolution of such scholarship can be seen in Les Harrison’s proposed panel titled “Remixing the American Renaissance” for the 2012 conference of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, a panel focused on “works written during the middle decades of the nineteenth century . . . at the dawn of the first information revolution in the United States—not just print, but cheap, abundant print, as well as the rise of visual and mass culture.” Harrison, who studies Poe and information technologies, is concerned with works that “made conscious use of the strategies which would come to be defined as remix culture (sampling, reappropriation, mixing of genres, repackaging).” Their “natural state” is one of “adaptation, fluid textuality, reprinting, reappropriation, distortion,” a viewpoint attributed to such scholars as John Bryant in The Fluid Text (2002) and, most significantly for this review, Meredith McGill in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834– 1853 [Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2003; see Harrison, posted e-mail to H-Amstdy, 22 August 2011, http://www.h-net.org/∼amstdy/]. McGill’s convincing revisionist view of the literary marketplace in Poe’s era as a “culture of reprinting” forms a key foundation for Hartmann’s The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe, which tries to tease out how Poe as a professional author strategically shaped his writing for “a culture marked by widespread reprinting of periodical and book-length texts” [2]. Indeed, one might find the seeds for Hartmann’s approach in the focuses that McGill outlines for her fourth chapter, “Unauthorized Poe” [cf. 149–51]. While Hartmann does not directly address the “fluidity” of Poe’s oft-reprinted texts as does McGill, Harrison’s proposed panel on “remixture” could extend its concerns to the online marketing of such monographs as Hartmann’s, which is itself a kind of adaptation and recirculation of the marketplace scholarship that informs it. Indeed, Google searches for The Marketing of Edgar Allan Poe will generate a","PeriodicalId":40386,"journal":{"name":"Poe Studies-History Theory Interpretation","volume":"108 1","pages":"115 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73255611","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}