Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

“Rethinking Poe’s Sublime: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 175 Years Later”

“The Grotesque and the Sublime as Identity Construction Tools in Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque”

Elena Anastaski, University of Tübingen

As Poe mentions in his preface, the epithets “grotesque” and “arabesque” “ indicate with sufficient precision the prevalent tenor of the tales.” I examine what this means in terms of characterization by concentrating on a specific aspect of these notions in connection with identity as a core element of the characters’ self-perceptions. I analyze the ways Poe constructs, establishes, and subsequently deconstructs identity using these modes in the compressed form of the short story genre.

The visual aspect of these notions taken from the field of architecture gives the experience of the self an additional “external” viewpoint. In “William Wilson,” for instance, the awe-inspiring school building with its “windings” and “incomprehensible subdivisions” that are “returning in upon themselves” maps the protagonist’s inner world. On the other hand, William Wilson’s double, by representing his moral traits, allows him to have an external view of part of his inner self, to experience his self as other. The feeling of the uncanny leads to the narrator’s belief “that myself and the being who stood before me had been acquainted at some epoch very long ago,” and culminates in his certitude that by murdering his double he has killed his own self.

The destabilizing effect of the grotesque on the characters’ perceptions of their own identities leads to new knowledge of themselves. While it is experienced as a threat to identity, it is nevertheless a means to access the inner self. This notion of the grotesque is also linked to Poe’s notion of the sublime insofar as it needs a strong counter pole. Being aware that both the grotesque and the sublime are liable to fall into ridicule due to their nature as extreme modes— the grotesque mainly due to the sense of absurdity it is wont to bring and the sublime due to its supernatural dimension—Poe often oscillates between the two to prevent his work from falling apart.

“‘Half Myself Has Buried the Other Half’: Early Modern Anxieties in Poe’s ‘The Man That Was Used Up’”

Whitney S. May, Texas State University

Poe’s decision to favor his satirical tale “The Man That Was Used Up” (early) in the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque has troubled his critics since its publication in 1840. In his extensive biography, for example, Arthur Quinn follows his observation of the tale’s place of distinction with the quip that while “there may be some profound meaning in this satire upon a general who is made up of cork legs, false teeth, and other artificial limbs, but it escapes the present writer.” The tale is often dismissed in this fashion as an outdated—if clever—satire on an uncertain, bygone historical figure, a parody which lost its value with the death of its target.

Despite its satirical style, “The Man That Was Used Up” offers grave insight into the anxieties of Poe’s audience, in particular those resulting from the approach of modernity on the nineteenth-century American public. Beneath the surface of Poe’s satire lurks a very real, and very modern, fear of society breaking into pieces, a fear adequately expressed via his macabre tale of a prominent general whose shattered body is secretly reconfigured using modern assembly-line practices. As such, Poe’s grotesque mode becomes a stylistic vehicle by which he can deliver a crucial critique of his post-Romantic, early modern moment in history, of the “inner dichotomy” that Marshall Berman suggests accompanies the pre-modern “sense of living in two worlds simultaneously.” The tale demands a serious analysis in terms of its position as a text between two conflicting worlds, between the retreating Romantic movement and the encroaching modern one that threatens to infiltrate Poe’s society as subtly as a grotesquely, technologically modified war hero. Indeed, this fear of the impending subversion of Poe’s historical moment by the modern is perhaps best demonstrated...