Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

As Poe mentions in his preface, the epithets “grotesque” and “arabesque” “indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales.” I examine what this means in terms of characterization by concentrating on a specific aspect of these notions in connection with identity as a core element of the characters’ self-perceptions. I analyze the ways Poe constructs, establishes, and subsequently deconstructs identity using these modes in the compressed form of the short story genre.The visual aspect of these notions taken from the field of architecture gives the experience of the self an additional “external” viewpoint. In “William Wilson,” for instance, the awe-inspiring school building with its “windings” and “incomprehensible subdivisions” that are “returning in upon themselves” maps the protagonist's inner world. On the other hand, William Wilson's double, by representing his moral traits, allows him to have an external view of part of his inner self, to experience his self as other. The feeling of the uncanny leads to the narrator's belief “that myself and the being who stood before me had been acquainted at some epoch very long ago,” and culminates in his certitude that by murdering his double he has killed his own self.The destabilizing effect of the grotesque on the characters’ perceptions of their own identities leads to new knowledge of themselves. While it is experienced as a threat to identity, it is nevertheless a means to access the inner self. This notion of the grotesque is also linked to Poe's notion of the sublime insofar as it needs a strong counter pole. Being aware that both the grotesque and the sublime are liable to fall into ridicule due to their nature as extreme modes—the grotesque mainly due to the sense of absurdity it is wont to bring and the sublime due to its supernatural dimension—Poe often oscillates between the two to prevent his work from falling apart.Poe's decision to favor his satirical tale “The Man That Was Used Up” (early) in the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque has troubled his critics since its publication in 1840. In his extensive biography, for example, Arthur Quinn follows his observation of the tale's place of distinction with the quip that while “there may be some profound meaning in this satire upon a general who is made up of cork legs, false teeth, and other artificial limbs, but it escapes the present writer.” The tale is often dismissed in this fashion as an outdated—if clever—satire on an uncertain, bygone historical figure, a parody which lost its value with the death of its target.Despite its satirical style, “The Man That Was Used Up” offers grave insight into the anxieties of Poe's audience, in particular those resulting from the approach of modernity on the nineteenth-century American public. Beneath the surface of Poe's satire lurks a very real, and very modern, fear of society breaking into pieces, a fear adequately expressed via his macabre tale of a prominent general whose shattered body is secretly reconfigured using modern assembly-line practices. As such, Poe's grotesque mode becomes a stylistic vehicle by which he can deliver a crucial critique of his post-Romantic, early modern moment in history, of the “inner dichotomy” that Marshall Berman suggests accompanies the pre-modern “sense of living in two worlds simultaneously.” The tale demands a serious analysis in terms of its position as a text between two conflicting worlds, between the retreating Romantic movement and the encroaching modern one that threatens to infiltrate Poe's society as subtly as a grotesquely, technologically modified war hero. Indeed, this fear of the impending subversion of Poe's historical moment by the modern is perhaps best demonstrated in the tale's very epigraph, loosely translated: “Weep, weep, my eyes, it is no time to laugh! / For half myself has buried the other half.”Harry Levin is among the critics who have suggested that Poe's use of the terms “arabesque” and “grotesque” in titling this collection of tales signaled his critical engagement with Sir Walter Scott's influential essay “On the Supernatural in Fictitious Composition.” My aim with this paper is to illuminate Poe's revision of Scott's supernaturalist aesthetics through the lens of Lovecraft's reception of Poe as a visionary of cosmic horror who “perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist.” In doing so, I hope to challenge a number of critical assumptions about Poe's use of the aesthetic categories of the grotesque and arabesque by exploring their close connection to Poe's re-figuration (or even de-figuration) of concepts of sublimity as articulated by earlier writers including Burke and Kant.Poe's decision to abandon the framing narrative of “The Folio Club” aptly signals his turn away from the tendency of earlier Gothic fiction, and earlier theories of sublimity, to elevate the human figure, most often through religious associations, to a transcendent position, and the apex of artistic expression. This decision is in keeping with the tendency evident in many of the tales themselves to displace and radically re-figure notions of identity and perception, highlighting the metaphysical direction that Poe will continue to take in his later fiction, as well as in his subversive philosophical writings, including Eureka. Rather than focusing closely on one or two stories in the collection, I will pursue a number of interlinked themes briefly through each of them, using Lovecraft's reading of Poe in Supernatural Horror in Literature as a lens through which we can readily recognize the nascent cosmic vision underlying the tales and the intimate connection between this vision and Poe's use of grotesque and arabesque aesthetics.Undergraduates know Poe as a popular cultural icon—from Fox's television series The Following (2013–15) to the plastic figurine of Poe with a raven on his shoulder for sale at the lone local independent bookshop, Poe enjoys a pop culture moment. Yet when our students’ understanding of antebellum American literature remains limited to the aridity of the college anthology, they are flummoxed to learn that Poe's take on the popular print culture of his day was mixed. When Poe resigned from Graham's Magazine as an editor in 1842, he notes his “disgust with the namby-pamby character of the Magazine—a character which it was impossible to eradicate—I allude to the contemptible pictures, fashion-plates, music and love tales.” Of course those features allowed Graham's to prosper in the marketplaces of antebellum popular print culture, whereas Poe tried but failed to establish a high-toned literary magazine of his own. Just three years later, Poe luxuriated in the popularity of “The Raven” (1845): “‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run’ … but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug.’ … The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” To understand antebellum American literature beyond its limited presence in the typical undergraduate survey course, students need exposure to the canon's doppelganger: popular antebellum print culture. In the past, I have circulated hard copies of antebellum magazines and gift books so students could experience the “contemptible” images about which Poe complained and the convention of anonymous or pseudonymous publication that stifled authorial reputations. In a digital environment, however, there is even more opportunity to teach Poe's relationship to the popular culture of his day. When grounded in the substantial scholarship treating Poe and antebellum print culture (Kennedy and McGann, Hayes, McGill, Whalen, Rosenheim and Rachman), undergraduates are equipped with the some of the critical tools needed to make sense of a sometimes bewildering array of digitally available primary sources. This paper explores the pedagogical benefits and pitfalls of teaching Poe's relationship to antebellum popular print culture in the age of Google Books.One of the most persistent challenges in the English classroom is reframing the familiar: this means striving to present well-known materials from a fresh perspective. In Authorizing Readers, Peter J. Rabinowitz states that the ultimate challenge of teaching texts that have become too familiar is that it can “privilege certain reading strategies over others and that, in so doing, it can confuse our classroom practice: It makes it hard for us to know either what we are teaching or what we should be teaching, and it consequently widens the gap between students and teachers.” Working with familiar texts means we need to strive for what Adrienne Rich calls “re-vision” in her essay, “When We Dead Awaken,” a way of encountering the familiar through a new critical lens for both the student and the teacher.In dealing with Poe's well-known texts, this struggle to re-see is a particular pitfall. One way to accomplish this task is to connect the emerging narrative forms of the digital age to such works. The rise of the podcast, stemming from the popularity of such narrative series as Serial, is a new avenue to explore. Specifically, this presentation discusses how narrative issues present within the newer podcast form can provide a balance of the familiar and the unfamiliar for both teachers and students of Poe. In dissecting the newly popular narrative forms of podcasts like Criminal and Serial with Poe texts such as “The Black Cat” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” students and teachers alike are provided with a different entry point for discussing ideas such as the narrative structures of suspense, the concerns of audience and reception in popular mediums, and continual thematic issues connected to crime, mystery, and the macabre. Framing the familiar discussions regarding Poe with podcasts provides everyone in the classroom the opportunity to re-see the familiar in productive and exciting ways.The premise of this paper is that even if our incoming students’ familiarity with Poe is often limited to Bart Simpson's interpretation of “The Raven,” many of them are familiar with a much more complex version of Poe in contemporary musician Tom Waits, whose relatively recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (which could hardly find a category in which to honor him) demonstrates a popularity that now far exceeds his early cult following. A brief unit on Waits's work might prepare students to engage not only Poe's mastery of a variety of styles but also his relation to the marketplace.In terms of both style and content, it is hard to believe Waits hasn't referenced Poe more specifically in interviews or in his music. Certainly no currently popular songwriter engages death in Poesque style as consistently as Waits (death is featured in a great number of Waits's songs, but “Dead and Lovely” from Real Gone even articulates (tropes on?) Poe's claim for poetry's “ideal subject” in “The Philosophy of Composition”). Waits's reputation has been dominated rightly or wrongly (as Poe's has) with his darker work, featuring the poor, the depraved, the paranoid, and the down-and-out. The characters of some of his most memorable songs walk right out of “King Pest” or the seedy side of town Poe describes in “Man of the Crowd,” but like Poe, Waits works in a wide variety of genres, tones, and rhythms. Moreover, Waits shares Poe's ability and penchant to adopt and reuse the popular styles of his culture's recent past to draw in (and at times dupe) his audiences.Beyond all these correspondences, what might make Waits an ideal introduction to Poe (and to Poe's professional context) is Waits's well-publicized and outspoken criticism of the methods by which music is published and circulated in the marketplace today. Most obviously, like Poe, he has used legal means to defend the integrity of his work and loudly criticized those who have sold out their artistic integrity to market considerations. In more complex ways, however, Waits and Poe show an understanding that they cannot bypass but must rather co-opt market forces to circulate their work, and as part of that effort, both realized they needed to produce “consumable” authorial images that might enable them to “sell” even while issuing a trenchant critiques of the effects of art's commodification from the position of “outsiders.” Of course, after introducing this catalog of similar contents and strategies, students can concentrate on continuities and differences in the process of art's production from the mid-nineteenth to the early twenty-first century.

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