Abstracts for the Poe Panels at the American Literature Association Conference

From the onset of “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe makes clear that the line between the human and nonhuman is not so much blurred as it is nonexistent. Environmental symbolism is especially significant in his rendering of organismic imbrication. The eponymous collapse refers to a double signification: the end of both the Usher family bloodline and the estate in which they dwelled. That Roderick and Madeline Usher, the last surviving Usher members, and the house die in near simultaneity is not coincidental but rather indicative of the insidious connection the three entities share. The symbiotic relationship that binds the Usher estate to the twins, and by extension the Usher bloodline, is parasitic in nature and ultimately engenders the final fall of the Houses of Usher. Poe grants additional agency to the tarn in its capacity to subsume what surrounds it. By characterizing and psychologizing his landscape with what Jane Bennett would call “vibrant materiality,” Poe posits the nonhuman world in “The Fall of the House of Usher” as both agent and aggressor.Scholars have long recognized the figure of the orangutan in Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue” as a symbol of race, and rightfully so. But to limit our understanding of the orangutan to a racial figure would be a critical oversight. My investigation of the orangutan's presence in early nineteenth-century transatlantic literary culture demonstrates that the animal was more than a racial symbol. In fact, it was a critical tool for Euro-American readers to consider their relationships to a vast world increasingly accessible through technology, empire, and print circulation; the natural, sometimes romanticized environment of foreign and ostensibly “inferior” civilizations, especially juxtaposed with the conditions of Euro American cities; the natural history of humans themselves (Poe's story appeared two years after Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle); and the ecological ethics of the nineteenth century.Travel accounts like “Account of an Ourang Outang, of Borneo” from Clarke Abel's 1821 Narrative of a Journey in the Interior of China provide extended descriptions of orangutans in their natural habitats and often include factual or fictional stories of the promises and dangers of orangutans in human society. Such accounts were widely printed and reprinted in newspapers, pamphlets, and books in the forty years before Poe's tale, drawing on the extensive scientific and popular interest in the human qualities of orangutans. This study contextualizes Poe's orangutan in nineteenth- century literary culture as a symbol of environmental health, hope, and horror, providing a new and important perspective on Poe and “Murders in the Rue Morgue.”Half of students' waking hours are spent immersed in screen time, and increasingly thoughtful discussion is being replaced with sound bites and manipulative messages. If, as an educator, I am to carve out a piece of the other half of the students' waking hours, I must meet them on their own turf: the digital world. Studying literature through interactive media speaks to a new technique, which is increasingly appealing contrasted with customary books where verbal appreciation is predominant and cost is prohibitive.I teach Poe on Blackboard using many digital tools. Students can access all of Poe's stories in text and audio forms and use annotate or hypothesis for close reading. For students who prefer listening to reading comments, from text to speech is available. Presentations are created using screencast-o-matic. To add pictures to their movies students search Unsplash, Pixaby, or VirtualHunt for free images.For research essays, students create three podcasts: their research topic, ongoing research, and an overview of the final essay, which students review on the Discussion board. The class blog is devoted to students' reviews of Poe digital sites for research purposes, including the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Mabbott Poe, and Knowing Poe, among many others.This study aims to disseminate and consolidate findings provided by current digital resources on the poem “The Raven.” Based on the current research tools, it was possible to collect a series of bibliographic data and other information related to Edgar Allan Poe's poem in various media and artistic domains from the past and today. “The Raven” was constantly reproduced in U.S. newspapers, demonstrating the great interest of the nineteenth-century media, the printed newspaper, in this text. Based on the digital resources of search and data analysis, it is possible to compile the musical, theatrical, visual, pictorial, and cinematographic works in dialogue with Poe's poem, as well as record the reproductive and technological evolution of these artistic dialogues.This presentation offers new didactic approaches, which may, for example, encourage students to make their own literary mappings. Since “The Raven” has also been reproduced countless times in anthologies and rhetoric textbooks, the result of the research reveals an impressive panorama of data, which can be studied in comparative perspective while acknowledging the potential obstacles of doing research in cyberspace.During the fall of 2019, I taught a graduate seminar at Virginia Commonwealth University called “Edgar Allan Poe and Digital Scholarly Editing.” The goal of the course was to introduce Poe to the students enrolled in our master's program, teach them the basics of scholarly editing, and familiarize them with some of the digital humanities tools and methodologies commonly used for the production of digital scholarly editions. Throughout the course, we paid special attention to the editorial and thematic challenges posed by the Poe corpus—not just the intervention of Rufus Griswold into Poe's textual and biographical record but Poe's own habit of revising and republishing his works throughout his life. As the final assignment in the course, students picked a text from the Poe corpus for which they compiled a Juxta comparison set along with a TEI-encoded digital critical edition of the work. Students prefaced each edition with an introduction that provided context for the work and that discussed major textual variants and how the inclusion or exclusion of these variants might change our understanding of Poe's text.I will discuss the classroom methodology used in this course along with the most significant findings reflected in the students' final projects. The presentation will close with a discussion of the difficulties inherent in attempts to represent fully the textual fluidity of well-known Poe tales, which are often presented in the classroom as stable, unitary texts.I teach an undergraduate senior capstone “major authors” course on Poe that relies heavily on freely accessible digital resources. This paper discusses how and why eapoe.org and other sources (Google Books, Making of America Journals, Hathi-Trust, Digital Maryland Edgar Allan Poe Collection) are integral to my class on Poe. We repair to a computer lab on the first day of class, where I've posted links to magazines in which Poe's early work appears—works we read in the beginning weeks of the course. When grounded in the substantial scholarship treating Poe and antebellum print culture (Kennedy and McGann, McGill, Whalen, Rosenheim and Rachman) and anchored by Frank Luther Mott's excellent History of American Magazines, undergraduates are equipped with the some of the critical tools needed to make sense of a sometimes bewildering array of digitally available primary sources. Additionally, by linking our literary readings to eapoe.org, Mabbott's notes for each week's literary sources are available so that students soon invoke Mabbott in class.But teaching Poe as a major author means that we also consider his letters. The second class includes a unit digitally linked to Poe's early letters; each student reports on a letter to two. The letters provide unequalled insights into Poe's struggles and are revelatory. We also review digitized images of handwritten letters through Digital Maryland. The eapoe.org site and other freely available sources are indispensable for student research papers, which require students to find a Poe-related primary source outside the syllabus. Digital resources are integral to teaching Poe in 2020.

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