Abstracts for MLA Poe Panels

Poe in the Twenty-First Century

1. Imagined Simians: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Planet of the Apes

Rebecca Evans, Duke University

In this paper, I argue that the twentieth- and twenty-first-century Planet of the Apes franchise functions as an extended sequel to Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” My paper explores how these narratives of simian enemies enact anxieties about species, agency (human and otherwise), and the fraught possibility of multispecies justice. Situating “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” in the context of the period’s keen interest in natural history and the human–ape relationship, I argue that Poe sought to negotiate the impact of proto-evolutionary theories on nineteenth-century models of human agency: the “Ourang- Outang,” with its slippery relationship to the human, stymies the retributive impulse of the criminal justice system, forcing Dupin and the police to improvise models of causality that do not necessarily result in the attribution of moral responsibility. I argue that Planet of the Apes uses the trope of the antagonistic ape to dramatize the same dilemma. My analysis will focus both on the original film, Planet of the Apes (1968), and on the recent reboot of the series, Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). Reading these films through Poe’s short story illuminates a narrative genealogy of texts in which simian enemies (and the transformations in biological knowledge and technology that they signify) motivate uneasy revisions of concepts of responsibility and justice by destabilizing species identity. I suggest that the recognition of this genealogy demands a recontextualization of the individual texts that participate in the simian trope.

2. Poe Kitsch: Bad Taste and Cultural Revenge

J. Gerald Kennedy, Louisiana State University

Pursuing a topic broached by Mark Niemeyer in “Poe and Popular Culture” and by Scott Peeples in The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, I will focus on Poe as “cultural signifier,” not as represented in the higher forms of cultural mimesis—drama, painting, fiction, opera, music, or film, nor even in comics and cartoons—but rather in the distinctly low artifacts of contemporary mass culture—I mean Poe action heroes, finger puppets, bobbleheads, and poseable figures. I mean as well even lower forms: Poe lunch boxes, playing cards, and Band-Aids. How low can Poe go, and what does it signify? The idea of kitsch provides a useful way of thinking about both pop culture phenomena (which I will display) and about Poe’s own war with the emerging consumerist capitalism he lampoons in “The Philosophy of Furniture.” Kitsch exploits the expectations of elitist high culture to flaunt bad taste, parodying respected forms and conventions to ridicule affectation. Baudrillard speaks of the proliferation of kitsch in Consumer Society as the vulgar displacement of the real by simulacra of cultural signs. Poe kitsch simultaneously vulgarizes and commodifies the disturbing Poe text as a harmless object of amusement, while transforming the always-impoverished author into a sizzling brand. If there is a cruel irony in Poe's mass-market appeal, it also reminds us of how Poe relentlessly produced literary kitsch himself, entertaining naive or vulgar readers with “horrible butchery” (as in Pym) or with pseudo-sentimental lines like “soft may the worms around her creep.”

3. New Spaces, New Maps: Poe’s Reorientation of American Literature in the Twenty-First Century

Robert T. Tally, Jr., Texas State University

Respondent: Scott Peeples, College of Charleston

As it developed into an academic discipline in the twentieth century, American literary studies established a national narrative that linked the diverse experiences and writings over four hundred years and across a continent into a somewhat coherent whole, but it did so in part by tethering major works of literature produced in the United States to regional developments like “the New England mind” or “the war of words and wits” in New York City (to cite two of Perry Miller’s influential works). The revisionary critiques of the field by later critics, including the New Americanists, frequently maintained the overall structures of this national “image repertoire” and its...