Jacob Rama Berman
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780814789506
- eISBN:
- 9780814789513
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9780814789506.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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
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.
