THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE: Edgar Allan Poe

Welcome back to The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The 2024 syllabus can be found here. This episode, the third in a 16-week sequence on American literature, focuses on the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. With help from writers as diverse as Borges, Mallarmé, and Lovecraft, I emphasize Poe’s extraordinary influence on world literature across several different domains from pulp fiction to avant-garde poetry. From his poem “The Raven” and his literary theoretical manifesto “The Philosophy of Composition,” I derive Poe’s formalist and polysemous aesthetics that would go on to influence modernist poetry and postmodernist literary theory, a conflict with the Transcendentalists cleaving the root of modernism and leading to further divisions like those between poets Pound and Stevens or critics Guy Davenport and Harold Bloom. In the Gothic stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “Ligeia” I identify his parodic recasting of older narrative forms, his aestheticism and exoticism, his cultural syncretism, his dark animism and vitalism, and his pervasive irony. In his mystery “The Purloined Letter,” I trace his invention of the detective genre and his theory of a poetry of the surface as reason’s highest form, surpassing mathematics and science. Finally, in his experimental tale “The Man of the Crowd,” I find the origins of urban and psychological fiction that looks forward to Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Joyce. In passing, I remark upon the ironized and commercialized simulacrum of traditionalism that places Poe at the origin of a uniquely American right-wing politics. Please like, share, comment, and enjoy!—and please offer a paid subscription so you don’t miss the rest of the American literature sequence, including Moby-Dick, not to mention the archive of episodes on modern British literature from Blake to Beckett and our previous sequences on the works of Joyce, including Ulysses, and on George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The slideshow corresponding to the lecture can be downloaded here: