Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, & Edgar Allan PoeStanford University Press, 1995 - 259 pages The work of Edgar Allan Poe and his place in the literary canon continues to provoke debate. Many critics have been puzzled as to how Poe can stand simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres, including detective and science fiction and certain modes of sensational or Gothic horror. Arguing that Poe is not exceptional but exemplary in this ambivalent relationship to mass culture, the author offers a new theory of mass culture and ideology through extended analysis of four motifs in Poe's works: the notion of the uncanny and its link to anxieties about originality; Gothic horror and identification; the confessional psychopath; and the figure of the dupe and the logic of the hoax. |
Contents
Right of the Mob | 32 |
Poe Sensationalism and the Sentimental | 93 |
Confessing the Crime of Confession | 126 |
The Cultural Logic of the Hoax | 174 |
Notes | 227 |
245 | |
Common terms and phrases
abstract Adorno aesthetic affect alien ambivalence American antebellum anxiety Barnum becomes body Bundy calls circulation coincident communication confession constitutes criminal critical death democratic Derrida describes desire detective fiction discourse disjunction double Edgar Allan Poe Eliot embodiment enunciation epigraph essay essentially example fact fantasy fiction figure finally genre idea identification identity ideological imaginary imagination impossible individual interpretation kind Lacan literary Little Eva logic madness mass culture meaning ment mesmeric Mesmeric Revelation metonymic Miller mirror stage mode narcissism narrative narrator narrator's notion novel object one's originality paradoxical particular perverse Philosophy of Composition plagiarism pleasure Poe's tale poem precisely produces Purloined Letter Raven reader readerly reading relation repetition seems sensational sense sentimental sentimental novel signifier simply simultaneously social limit social power story superego symbolic sympathy temporal textual thematic three-card monte tion uncanny Valdemar visible void William Wilson words writing Žižek