Historicizing Poe at the Turn of the Century

his discussions in effect “argue”quite the contrary. Historicizing:Poe at the Turn v of the Century In a chapter devoted to the “privacyassignableto intimate experiences,” Renza contends that Stevens “casts”such experiences “in an erotic light that at once scandalizessentimentalist views of intimacy and resistsobversetranscendentalist revisions” [1551.An “eroticlight”is one thing, but this-about “theroller of big cigars” in “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”-is another: Cigar as “corona”both puns on “coroner”and doubles as a metonym for a “crown,”although not exactly of an emperor . Crown equally doubles as a vulgar idiomatic allusion to the head of the penis [needless to say, “corona” and “crown”are not in the text]. Calling“theroller of big cigars”thus means invoking the biologistic force that resultsin erections,which,as “Themuscularone,”the roller personifies.Andjust as one prepares food to satisfy physical appetites, his whipping up “concupiscent curds” in “kitchencups”evokesfilling testicleswith sperm, the goal ofwhich issheerpleasurabledischargefor the male. [1771 I wouldn’tknow. But I do know that Renza’sdecision not to engage his private-publicbinarywith Stevens’s imagination-realityor subject-objectcomplex makes for disappointing readings of his poems. The forced entry ofwhat really concerns Renzathe scene of writing and the “surplus” it createsinto the issue of public and private domains as they are formulated in terms of cultural criticism constrains him from developing a more convincingliterary argument. His readings subscribe to the public determinants of his discourse. At the outset, Renza declares: “To be sure, I may choose not to regard imaginative, literary works for their political emissions . ...Yet in the present academic environment, that choice, too, will perforce appear political” [123 . It would not just appear but would be political; but I would think more is at stake than establishing one’s personal political credentials. Because Renza fails to make that choice, he ends up politicizing his texts by using them as ammunition on the politicalacademic battlefield, and thus reduces them to episodesin , or allegoriesof,his own politically instigated plot. This is every bit as problematic as the reductive politicizing of those he indicts; at least those perps would not claim to be defending “literature.” Mutlu Konuk Blasing Brown University J.Gerald Kennedy,ed.A HistoricalGuidetoEdgarAllan Poe. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,2001.247 pp. $15.95 paper. On 27 December 1988,at the Modern Language Association convention in New Orleans, cultural historian Dominick LaCapra announced with some portentousness a paradigm shift in the discipline of literature ; the “DWord,”as he called it, was now “out,” and the “HWord”was “in” [“On the Line: Between History and Criticism”]. For some scholars who worked on Poe, LaCapra’s acknowledgment of deconstruction’seclipseby historicismwas awelcome return to business as usual. Since at least 1941,when Arthur Hobson Quinn published his monumental biography, a steady stream of scholars-most notably Sidney P. Moss, Perry Miller, and Burton R. Pollin-had published works placing Poe squarely, and even confrontationally,in the context of his own milieu. Such works, which we might now call “Old Historicist”in tendency,positioned themselvesin o p position to the equally venerable countertradition that approached Poe as if his historicity were neither evident nor relevant. Indeed, earlier in the year, before LaCapra’stalk, this trend reached its apogee with the publication of The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Dm’da, and Psychoanalytic Reading, a collection of essays by Lacan, Derrida, BarbaraJohnson, and others written from an avowedly poststructuralist-and implicitly antihistoricist-perspective. The revalidation of history asan interpretive frame of reference has unquestionably given new life to this older historicist tradition of Poe scholarshipand hasresulted, for example, in the recent paperback republication by Johns Hopkins University Press of Quinn’s biography and Miller’sstudy TheRaven and the Whak(1956).But the historicism whose arrival LaCapra heralded in 1988 was not the “OldHistoricism”of Miller or Quinn but a “New Historicism” that drew from Nietzsche and Foucault, Althusser and Marcuse, and that appealed most immediately to scholars of the court-centered world of Renaissance England. While such scholars asWalter Benn Michaelsand Gillian Brown soon a p plied this type of New Historicism to antebellum literature with dazzling effect, still other forms of historicist methodology-informed’ for example, by 76 Birmingham School cultural...