Putting Context to New Use in Literary Studies: A Conceptual-Historicist Interpretation of Poe's "Man of the Crowd"
TL;DR: The authors examines critical practices at work in the interpretation of Poe's canonical piece "The Man of the Crowd" in light of the recent debates in literary studies around the problem of context and contextualization in general and the "hegemony" of new historicism in particular.
Abstract: Poe's adherence to a strict aesthetic formalism used to be problematic for studies of the relationship between his work and its American context; the methodology of New Historicism has helped to surmount this problem but sometimes with excessive emphasis on socio-historical contexts. This essay examines critical practices at work in the interpretation of Poe's canonical piece "The Man of the Crowd" in light of the recent debates in literary studies around the problem of context and contextualization in general and the "hegemony" of new historicism in particular. It then suggests an alternative method of reading literary texts and their contexts — one based on Reinhart Koselleck's history of concepts. It offers an analysis of "The Man of the Crowd" as an illustration of this method.
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TL;DR: Poe's "The Man of the Crowd" as mentioned in this paper is considered a counterpart to "The Purloined Letter" in cultural theory and has been particularly valued as a kind of sociological document which reveals and critiques aspects of the scopic and material conditions of the modern city.
Abstract: Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’, as Patricia Merivale has observed, be justifiably be considered a counterpart to ‘The Purloined Letter’ in its significance in cultural theory. It has been particularly valued as a kind of sociological document which reveals and critiques aspects of the scopic and material conditions of the modern city.Yet despite an almost universal acknowledgement that the tale is about ‘reading’, most critics have worked with a rather impoverished model of reading. Following the example of Tom Gunning, who has argued that the tale provides premonitions of a range of spectator positions in cinema, this essay argues that the story dramatizes typical responses to the literary text which are more complex than the flan flanerie. To place the text in a more explicitly literary context opens it up to an analysis which takes account of how complex its structure is, and the fact that the narrator has typically-Poe-esque ‘delusional’ credentials, and acknowledge how this might compromise or complicate some of the arguments about urban reading. As such it demands to be considered in terms of the capacity of Poe’s fiction to seduce readers into what Joseph Kronick has called, ‘identifying the intepretation with the text’, particularly in relation to the particular self-reflexive effect Garrett Stewart has termed the ‘gothic of reading’.
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TL;DR: In this article , Cananau et al. examined the reading process of the reader in "The Man of the Crowd" and found that it exhibits emptiness in subjectivity, one of the heated topics of Lacanian theory.
Abstract: Edgar Allan Poe says in the first sentence that “it does not permit itself to be read,” to build a myth in “The Man of the Crowd,” which refuses to be decoded. Compared with the plot, the story is more structurally attractive to readers. Accordingly, much formalistic efforts have been made in examining the narrative strategies of the story, such as “‘ambiguity’, ‘irony’, ‘doubleness,’ and ‘unreliability’” (Cananau 242). As Iulian Cananau observes, “[a] more recent formalist inquiry, inspired by poststructuralism and genre criticism, reads ‘The Man of the Crowd’ not against the socio-cultural context, but against a ‘literary’ one that consists of the broader framework of Gothic fiction and a representative selection of Poe’s other canonical short stories” (242). This inquiry, applied in analyzing the reading process of the reader, can be extended to the “reading process” of the narrator who follows the old man for a long time and yet fails to figure out the old man’s secret, which might lead to the conclusion that Poe, by exhibiting the futility of pursuing meaning, turns the short story into a symbol of empty subjectivity. However, it will be a more enlightening effort when we pay attention to the narrator’s keen interest in following the old man, which structurally shapes the short story into a double-layered pursuit. It exhibits Poe’s textual endeavor to portray the theme of the story: emptiness in subjectivity, one of the heated topics of Lacanian theory, which, in probing the relationship between language and identity, exhibits diversified textual features among different literary works. For example, in the interpretation of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Pyeaam Abbasi argues that Prufrock’s failure to become a “speaking subject” in the symbolic order of language leads to a “neurotic” Prufrock (118). To some extent, Lacanian theory is so deconstructive that the gap between the symbolic order and imaginative order cannot be bridged even for a speaking subject. Accordingly, when we take the narrator as a speaking subject in “The Man of the Crowd,” the short https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2022.2080519
TL;DR: This article introduced a new approach to the history of pro-test literature, and to literary history writing in general, by investigating three antebellum American works by women that ex ect.
Abstract: This essay introduces a new approach to the history of pro‐ test literature, and to literary history writing in general. My case studies investigate three antebellum American works by women that ex ...
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01 Jan 1835
TL;DR: De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures as mentioned in this paper, and also predicts that slavery will bring about the'most horrible of civil wars', foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.
Abstract: Abridged, with an Introduction by Patrick Renshaw. Democracy in America is a classic of political philosophy. Hailed by John Stuart Mill and Horace Greely as the finest book ever written on the nature of democracy, it continues to be an influential text on both sides of the Atlantic, above all in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. De Tocqueville examines the structures, institutions and operation of democracy, and shows how Europe can learn from American success and failures. His central theme is the advancement of the rule of the people, but he also predicts that slavery will bring about the 'most horrible of civil wars', foresees that the USA and Russia will be the Superpowers of the twentieth century, and is 150 years ahead of his time in his views on the position and importance of women.
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TL;DR: Tribe as discussed by the authors discusses the relation of past and future in modern history and the planes of historicity in the perspective of a modernized historical process, focusing on the relation between the past and the future.
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TL;DR: The need for theory in the discipline of history has been discussed in this article, with a focus on social history and concepts of historical time and social history, as well as the concept of crisis.
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