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Held in Reserve: Banks, Serial Crises, and the Ekphrastic Turn

John O’brien

in Literature Incorporated: The Cultural Unconscious of the Business Corporation, 1650-1850

The Panic of 1837 was the financial crisis that set the pattern for such paroxysms of instability in the financial system ever since. This chapter explores the importance of the figure of the bank in ... More

The Panic of 1837 was the financial crisis that set the pattern for such paroxysms of instability in the financial system ever since. This chapter explores the importance of the figure of the bank in the years that followed the Panic, particularly as it was deployed in works of fiction by Harriet Martineau, Robert Morris, and Edgar Allan Poe. Such works share a key rhetorical feature with the writings of economists in that they deploy the figure known as ekphrasis, the “speaking picture,” invoking images to mark the place where narration fails to convey the full complexity of their text’s meaning. The chapter ends with a reading of Poe’s “The Gold Bug” as incorporating a screen memory of the labor and violence that subtended the global economic system.Less

Animals and the Letter of the Law

Edgar Allan Poe

in Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical Subjectivity

This chapter explores the relationship between human and animal subjectivity and how American literature engages with and critiques biopower. To this end, the chapter offers a reading of Edgar Allan ... More

This chapter explores the relationship between human and animal subjectivity and how American literature engages with and critiques biopower. To this end, the chapter offers a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's writing, which uses animals to link ratiocination, the abstract reasoning that undergirds symbolic discourse, with an alternative register of embodied meaning-making that founds and undercuts it. Poe's stories locate us at the (dis)joint between rights discourse and post-structuralism that lie at the crux of animal studies: they inquire into the criminal justice system's codifications and erasures of subjectivity. If detective fiction ascribes “the individualistic ethic…to the criminal,” Poe questions that ethic in the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” by making the criminal—that is, the author of a “poetic work”—an animal. Associating individuality and poesis with animals, Poe's fiction develops a practice and a theory of animal representation that not only critiques biopower's operations but imagines the negation of subjectivity as the grounds for new representative and representational possibilities.Less

When Is Now?: Poe’s Aesthetics of Temporality

Cindy Weinstein

in American Literature's Aesthetic Dimensions

This chapter presents a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym that combines narrative theory, history of science, and Poe's racial politics. It begins by identifying ... More

This chapter presents a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym that combines narrative theory, history of science, and Poe's racial politics. It begins by identifying the uses to which time in Pym is put and then reads those uses in a dialectic relation with “wider” contexts. First, the analysis foregrounds and theorizes Pym's colliding tenses through the vocabulary provided by Gerard Genette, specifically the temporal “anachronies” of prolepsis and analepsis. The temporal chaos of the narrative—its shifting dates, unknowable o'clocks, and warping sentences—is both caused by and reflected in the text, which fails to keep track of its time-keeping devices, in particular the run-down watch and the lost chronometer. The missing chronometer leads to the reading's second framework, which is the history of science, particularly John Harrison's 1735 discovery of the chronometer and the measurement of longitude. Longitude, which is the conversion of time into space, gave explorers a sure sense of where they were and consequently made exploration safer and more profitable. Calculating longitude, however, depends upon keeping track of time, which is a dicey proposition in Pym. The third step in the reading is an examination of Poe's perturbations of time in relation to his representations of race. It is argued that Pym's quick descent into a temporal freefall works against Poe's notion of time as a reliable demarcation of the differences between civilization and savagery, present and past, white and black. The text attempts to recover, but not wholly successfully, its sense of now by locating its then in the alleged clarity of racial difference with which Pym concludes.Less

What's the Point of a Revolution?: Edgar Allan Poe and the Origins of the Asylum

in Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture

Building on a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” this chapter explores some of the inner contradictions in the ideology of the asylum ... More

Building on a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe's short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” this chapter explores some of the inner contradictions in the ideology of the asylum that Ralph Waldo Emerson could never quite acknowledge. In particular, the reading opens out to interrogate the place of the asylum in a post-revolutionary, democratic society. In this ominous story, Poe links the emergence of the moral treatment to the outbreak of the French Revolution, and—through terrifying racial imagery at the end—to the uprising of slaves against their Southern masters. Poe's story crawls along the psychological underside of that nexus, hinting at the rage of those exploited. It is not only the slave system that creates this disorder; liberal democracy is as much to blame. Guided by a Burkean fear of (and a Sadean fascination with) the breakdown of authority, Poe sees the asylum as an instance of the worst kind of bourgeois humanitarian illusion: that civility can put up a good fight against unreason without descending into the abyss of madness.Less

Detecting “Absolute Chance”

Charles Peirce and Anna Katharine Green

in Accident Society: Fiction, Collectivity, and the Production of Chance

This chapter examines pragmatism by focusing on two writers who rely on chance to conduct their investigations: Charles Sanders Peirce and Anna Katharine Green. It looks at Green's detective fiction ... More

This chapter examines pragmatism by focusing on two writers who rely on chance to conduct their investigations: Charles Sanders Peirce and Anna Katharine Green. It looks at Green's detective fiction (including The Woman in the Alcove) in relation to Peirce's account of his own sleuthing after a stolen watch (“Guessing”) and shows that both writers had difficulty reconciling a socializing conception of chance with narrative forms that are, by definition, highly teleological. The chapter first traces the development of Peirce's conception of absolute chance out of his earlier and more cautious claims about probability theory and pragmatic contingency, along with his gradual transition from pragmatism in the 1870s to a more traditional metaphysics later. It then considers Green's chance-saturated fiction which, like that of Peirce, encounters the problem of representing chance in a genre destined to demystify crime in the end. The chapter concludes by looking at a third detective writer interested in chance, Edgar Allan Poe.Less

Poe’s Taste for the Arabesque

Jacob Rama Berman

in American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

This chapter examines the translation of the image of the Arab into a “unique” expression of American romanticism, particularly in Edgar Allan Poe's oeuvre. In Poe, the figure of the Arab facilitates ... More

This chapter examines the translation of the image of the Arab into a “unique” expression of American romanticism, particularly in Edgar Allan Poe's oeuvre. In Poe, the figure of the Arab facilitates the experience of difference as sameness, the foreign as familiar, and the alien as domestic. In a sense, Poe cultivates the anxieties that are latent in the contact narrative's use of the image of the Arab to establish American national, cultural, and racial difference. Indeed, tracking the arabesque's movement from Arab cultural reference to uniquely American aesthetic demonstrates the role of translation in Poe's romanticism. Retranslating Poe's arabesque back into Arabo-Islamic cultural discourse, in turn, reveals resonance between Arab and American romanticism.Less

“The Sea Is History”: Apocalypse and the New World Romance

Gretchen J. Woertendyke

in Hemispheric Regionalism: Romance and the Geography of Genre

In this chapter, I read Scottish writer John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” and its relationship to the writing of two prominent nineteenth-century American writers, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman ... More

In this chapter, I read Scottish writer John Howison’s “The Florida Pirate” and its relationship to the writing of two prominent nineteenth-century American writers, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville. What the explicit fictionality of the romance offers, however, is a more seamless negotiation of geography and history than is possible in the didactic, ostensibly nonfictional fugitive slave narrative. The violence of slavery is registered through an apocalyptic vision, one in which the future seems to offer no possibility for resolution, only unrealized and unfathomable destruction. These stories increasingly embody a sense of despair, loss, and fear as the inevitability of violent conflict over the question of slavery in the United States becomes clear. Howison, Poe, and Melville exploit the available terror and spectacular imagery circulating in the years surrounding the Civil War in stories that raise questions about the future of US relations in the broader hemisphere.Less

Attention Surfeit Disorder: An “Interregnum” on Poescript vs. Plot

Garrett Stewart

in Novel Violence: A Narratography of Victorian Fiction

This chapter analyzes the violence in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It explains that the traumatic material in Poe's works is wholly out in the open. Violence is rhetorically propelled and ... More

This chapter analyzes the violence in the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. It explains that the traumatic material in Poe's works is wholly out in the open. Violence is rhetorically propelled and explicitly passed on as confessional discourse. In this case, the works of Poe can be considered to possess potential double violence. This chapter highlights the fact that Poe's distillate of the linguistic issue is unmatched.Less

The Forms of the Perverse

Catherine Toal

in The Entrapments of Form

This chapter proposes that the transfer of literary influence achieved by Baudelaire’s recognition and misinterpretation of Poe’s “perverse” (the latter a widespread emergent American fictional ... More

This chapter proposes that the transfer of literary influence achieved by Baudelaire’s recognition and misinterpretation of Poe’s “perverse” (the latter a widespread emergent American fictional motif) contributes to the revision, within French literature, of the Sadean tableau of torture. This revision culminates in Lautréamont’s presentation of poetic rhetoric as a camouflage for murder. Arguing that the literary perverse obfuscates violence, the chapter draws on concepts of cruelty deployed in reading these works to show their relationship to the demands of context: in American literature, the pressures exerted by the burden of genocide; in French prose poetry, the claims of a repressed libertine-aristocratic prerogative. Walter Benjamin’s contention, in 1940, that Gaston Bachelard’s celebration of the kinds of violence represented in Lautréamont’s Maldoror amounted to a defense of “Hitlerism,” sums up the theme of this investigation: the relationship between literary form and historical projects of annihilation.Less

The Drunkard’s Demons

Matthew Warner Osborn

in Rum Maniacs: Alcoholic Insanity in the Early American Republic

The final chapter traces how delirium tremens shaped representations of pathological drinking in mid nineteenth-century popular culture. Finding depictions of the disease in the writings of some of ... More

The final chapter traces how delirium tremens shaped representations of pathological drinking in mid nineteenth-century popular culture. Finding depictions of the disease in the writings of some of the most popular and enduring authors of the nineteenth century, such as Edgar Allan Poe, T. S. Arthur, George Dugganne, Robert Byrd, and George Lippard and in some of the most popular melodramas of the era, such as The Drunkard: Or, The Fallen Saved!! and Ten Nights in a Barroom, the chapter asks why were graphic enactments of white men suffering the violent insanity of delirium tremens so fascinating to middle-class audiences? The chapter argues that Americans’ perverse fascination with delirium tremens highlighted deep conflicts in attitudes towards drinking and, more broadly, in the ascendant requirements for success and respectability. Narratives of pathological drinking demonstrate a powerful desire for transcendent experience, and a release from the responsibilities, anxieties, and imperatives of the new middle-class selfhood.Less

The Moral Vernacular of American Copyright Reform

Michael J. Everton

in The Grand Chorus of Complaint: Authors and the Business Ethics of American Publishing

The nineteenth-century debate over international copyright is usually framed as a battle over law and economics. Many of the antagonists saw the law and economics of intellectual property, however, ... More

The nineteenth-century debate over international copyright is usually framed as a battle over law and economics. Many of the antagonists saw the law and economics of intellectual property, however, as subsets of a larger ethical question. And reformers such as Cornelius Mathews, William Gilmore Simms, and Edgar Allan Poe relied on a moral rhetoric that tried to make ethics, rather than custom, law, or economics, the predominant factor in the conduct of American print culture. Chapter 4 argues that these reformers consciously and unconsciously ignored the reality of literary property and fabricated a realm in which moral law was paramount and principle trumped judicial and political imperatives.Less

Aping Apes: Edgar Allan Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Richard Wright's Native Son

Christopher Peterson

in Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality

Chapter 1 situates Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in relation to eighteenth and nineteenth-century evolutionary and racial discourses in order to show how the hierarchy that whites invented in ... More

Chapter 1 situates Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in relation to eighteenth and nineteenth-century evolutionary and racial discourses in order to show how the hierarchy that whites invented in order to situate blacks as more closely related to simians both functioned to justify slavery and denied the monogenic history of humans and apes. While some recent criticism has insisted that Poe's murderous orangutan ought to be read primarily in racial terms, I argue that such analyses fail to grasp how nineteenth-century racist ideologies were in some measure fuelled by the perceived threat to human exceptionalism posed by nascent evolutionist discourses. The orangutan thus emerges as an allegory for the hybridization of all humans rather than as a transparent symbol of a black slave. Turning to Richard Wright's Native Son, which uncannily anticipates racialized readings of Poe by focusing on a young black man who is portrayed as an ape after he murders a young white girl, the chapter concludes that Wright performs an immanent critique of white racism by illuminating the duplicitous construction of Bigger as both an irrational animal and an accountable human subject.Less

The Inorganic Plant in the Romantic Garden

Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari

in Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his ... More

This chapter approaches Romantic aesthetics through the “plant horror” of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), who had an ambivalent relationship to Romantic vitalism, and studies the way in which his arabesque vegetality travels into the work of later writers, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935). Poe’s foregrounding of the eighteenth-century notion of “the sentience of all vegetable things” in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) both responds to and undermines Romantic ideas about human affinities with plants. In “Usher,” Poe follows the Enlightenment analogy of human to plant to its logical conclusion in order to expose its aporias; for him, vegetal sentience cannot be contained within any hierarchy of being. At the same time, Poe destroys the Romantic fusional model—in which humans and plants commune within a shared physical world—by focusing on the destructive and rapacious qualities of the vegetal. The transcendental ideas of beauty and the sublime give way in Poe to a vegetality that invades the human consciousness. He suggests that humans might be horrified, rather than delighted, by the calamity that a vegetal modernity represents, even though (and perhaps because) they have no alternative to it.Less

From the World of Silence to Poetic Language: Merleau-Ponty and Valéry

Galen A. Johnson

in Merleau-Ponty's Poetic of the World: Philosophy and Literature

This chapter makes explicit the influence of Valéry whose poem La Pythie [The Pythoness] is quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the penultimate sentence of The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty ... More

This chapter makes explicit the influence of Valéry whose poem La Pythie [The Pythoness] is quoted by Merleau-Ponty in the penultimate sentence of The Visible and the Invisible. Merleau-Ponty discussed the work and life of Paul Valéry (1871–1945) for the entire first half of the first course of 1953, Recherches sur l’usage littéraire du langage. After early poetic successes, Valéry experienced a deep personal crisis that led him to impose a silence upon himself, which lasted for a period of twenty-five years from 1892 until 1917, after which he emerged reborn as a writer. Merleau-Ponty recognizes the power of silence to nourish both poetic and philosophical language in relation to three orders or dimensions: “the horizon of the visible, the horizon of the nameable, and the horizon of the thinkable.” The notions of the “chiasma of two destinies” and the “implex of words” derive directly from Valéry, who leads on to Mallarmé and Baudelaire together with Edgar Allan Poe, as well as to Francis Ponge, who captured this overlapping exchange among the dimensions of Being in Taking the Side of Things [Le parti pris des choses].Less

Antebellum Idealism

David E. Shi

in Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850–1920

Genteel idealism, domestic idealism, and transcendental idealism dominated the intellectual landscape during the 1830s and 1840s, but three of America's most powerful and enduring writers fell ... More

Genteel idealism, domestic idealism, and transcendental idealism dominated the intellectual landscape during the 1830s and 1840s, but three of America's most powerful and enduring writers fell outside such categories. Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne rebelled against the static conservatism of the genteel tradition, displayed a jealous disgust at the popular female sentimentalists, and castigated the Transcendentalists for their irrepressible optimism and airy metaphysics. Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe found their guiding motive in the deep recesses of the tormented soul rather than in the wonders of nature or what Hawthorne called the “white sunshine of actual life.” Although each wrote fictional works remarkable for their accurate details and realizing effects, their outlooks were essentially idealistic—or romantic—in their common desire to probe the heart of the self and explore the hidden spheres of feeling and spirit.Less

The Silence of the Image

Roger Pearson

in Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence

This chapter shows that ‘Billet’ is more than just a poetic letter praising an ephemeral English review. It is also a homage to James McNeill Whistler, whom Mallarmé viewed as the living embodiment ... More

This chapter shows that ‘Billet’ is more than just a poetic letter praising an ephemeral English review. It is also a homage to James McNeill Whistler, whom Mallarmé viewed as the living embodiment of his fellow American, Edgar Allan Poe.Less

In Imagination: Traveling Clairvoyance and the Suspension of Disbelief

Emily Ogden

in Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism

As mesmerism spread in the US, it changed: Poyen’s vision of credulity governed by a detached operator gave way to a more collaborative relationship between mesmerist and subject. The first ... More

As mesmerism spread in the US, it changed: Poyen’s vision of credulity governed by a detached operator gave way to a more collaborative relationship between mesmerist and subject. The first distinctly American variation, “traveling clairvoyance,” emerged in Providence, Rhode Island, as mesmerist Thomas Hartshorn explained. Subjects could voyage “in imagination” to distant cities, describing what they saw—but only if their interlocutors pretended to be traveling, too. The pretense of belief had a tendency to become real. When blind clairvoyant Loraina Brackett, future pupil of Samuel Gridley Howe at the Perkins School for the Blind, converted prominent skeptic William Leete Stone to the mesmeric cause, traveling clairvoyance became nationally known. This chapter shows how Brackett challenged assumptions about her blindness and how she can challenge critical approaches to agency and disability today. Turning to Edgar Allan Poe’s “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” and “The Angel of the Odd,” this chapter reconsiders Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s formulation “the willing suspension of disbelief” in light of Bruno Latour’s work and Brackett’s mesmeric practice.Less

Expression and Theatricality, or Medium Poe

Adam Frank

in Transferential Poetics, from Poe to Warhol

This chapter reads the fragmented depiction of faces in several of Poe’s short stories in order to develop an account of expression that is not opposed to repression and that does not rely on ... More

This chapter reads the fragmented depiction of faces in several of Poe’s short stories in order to develop an account of expression that is not opposed to repression and that does not rely on idealized self-presence and interiority. It makes use of Silvan Tomkins's writing on the General Images of the affect system and the taboos on looking to describe the peculiar shamelessness of Poe’s writing. In a reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” the chapter proposes the significance of the lifting of the taboos on looking in theatrical experience as one affective source for theater itself. It argues that Poe’s writing conveys the shamelessness of looking in theatrical experience and that this forms the basis of his writing’s appeal across cultural divides.Less