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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Journal Article•
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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TL;DR: In this article, Manovich locates Dziga Vertov's visual essay, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), at a juncture of emerging cinematic theory and proposes the application of its text as a dataset to map out the logic driving the technical and stylistic development of new media.
Abstract: The correlation of film with digital culture is not a new enterprise. D.N. Rodowick sees cinema as providing ‘the most productive conceptual horizons against which we can assess what is new’. Relieved that digital culture is not emerging in a theoretical vacuum, Rodowick nevertheless regrets that ‘a whole new industry and art emerged in the early twentieth century without a philosophical or sociological context that allowed its social impact and consequences to be imagined’. Could a sociologist in 1907 have predicted, he asks, what cinema would become in 50 years?1 Lev Manovich locates Dziga Vertov’s visual essay, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), at a juncture of emerging cinematic theory and proposes the application of its text as a dataset ‘to map out the logic driving the technical and stylistic development of new media’.2 Other theorists agree that a productive conceptual horizon is to be found in film, although few explore the principles involved the way Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin do in remediation.3
72 citations
Book•
21 Jan 2010
TL;DR: This book argues that privacy is an enduring value and that data protection should be considered a legal right, not a human right.
Abstract: Preface 1. Privacy in peril 2. An enduring value 3. A legal right 4. Privacy and freedom of expression 5. Data protection 6. The death of privacy? References Further reading Index
52 citations
TL;DR: Rasmussen as mentioned in this paper discusses the relationship between formalism and historical formalism in the context of Shakespeare's sonnets and the politics of aesthetics of the Shakespearean Wordplay corpus.
Abstract: Introduction New Formalisms? M.D.Rasmussen PART I: TOWARD A HISTORICAL FORMALISM Between Form and Culture: New Historicism and the Promise of a Historical Formalism S.Cohen Shakespeare and the Composite Text D.Bruster The Politics of Aesthetics: Recuperating Formalism and the Country House Poem H.Dubrow Marston's Gorge and the Question of Formalism J.Loewenstein PART II: RENEWING THE LITERARY Learning from the New Criticism: The Example of Shakespeare's Sonnets P.Alpers The Aesthetics of Shakespearean Wordplay M.Womack The Poetics of Speeck Tags W.Flesch Flirting with Eternity: Teaching from a Meter in a Renaissance Literature Class E.H.Sagaser Afterword: How Formalism Became a Dirty Word, and Why We Can't Do Without It R.Strier
51 citations
14 Jan 2014
TL;DR: Mc McMahon and Moyn as discussed by the authors discuss the return of the history of ideas in the context of Intellectual and Cultural History, and the role of gender in this history, as well as the relationship between gender, Freud, Foucault, and subjectivity in Intellectual History.
Abstract: Acknowledgments Contributors Introduction: Interim Intellectual History Darrin M. McMahon and Samuel Moyn 1. The Return of the History of Ideas? Darrin M. McMahon 2. Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas Peter E. Gordon 3. Does Intellectual History Exist in France?: The Chronicle of a Renaissance Foretold Antoine Lilti 4. On Conceptual History Jan-Werner Muller 5. Scandalous Relations: Supplementing Intellectual and Cultural History Judith Surkis 6. Imaginary Intellectual History Samuel Moyn 7. Has the History of the Disciplines Had Its Day? Suzanne Marchand 8. Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas John Tresch 9. Decentering Sex: Reflections on Freud, Foucault, and Subjectivity in Intellectual History Tracie Matysik 10. Can we see ideas? On Evocation, Experience, and Empathy Marci Shore 11. The Space of Intellect and the Intellect of Space John Randolph 12. The International Turn in Intellectual History David Armitage 13. Global Intellectual History and the Indian Political Shruti Kapila 14. Intellectual History and the Interdisciplinary Ideal Warren Breckman
50 citations