Teaching Poe Abroad

As I took the shuttle train in the Zurich Airport, I heard a cowbell, a yodel, and an alpenhorn. I knew I wasn't in State College anymore. Indeed, I was on my way to Fribourg, Switzerland, where, through the kind invitation of Thomas Austenfeld, I was to be a Fulbright Specialist for nineteen days at the University of Fribourg. My focus was to be Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. Also, I was to give a lecture on Poe at the University of Lausanne.

I had a large lecture class (over ninety undergraduates) and a small seminar (of about fifteen, mostly graduate students) that I taught for three successive Tuesdays. Poe was featured in the first lecture class. It is evidently characteristic of European university lecture classes for faculty to offer strict lectures without the expectation that the students would have read the work under consideration. There is not quite as much give-and-take in the lecture class as there is in the seminar. Accordingly, over the summer, I prepared notes for three ninety-minute lectures—one of these on Poe, one on Hawthorne, and one on Melville. Although Fribourg is both French-speaking and German-speaking, the classes at the university in American studies were—fortunately for me—in English.

What seemed to me would be of greatest interest for the students were stories of my investigations. For Poe, I began with my graduate work on Pym with Leslie Fiedler at SUNY Buffalo, going on to explain my interpretation of Poe's remarkable novel, involving three levels—the literal, the autobiographical, and the biblical. I offered a blend of methodologies, including close reading, source study, formal analysis, and archival exploration. I continued by discussing the contemporary annotations in copies of first editions of Pym, revealing readers' annoyed disbelief and admiring amazement. I told the story of my work on the 1988 Pym Conference, leading to the discovery of a source for "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," which in turn led to the discovery of fourteen newspaper sources for the first modern detective tale. And I recounted the story of my discovering, thirteen years later, a new source for "The Purloined Letter" and realizing that I had a book to write on the Dupin tales. I therefore studied also "The Mystery of Marie Roget," for which newspaper work was critical to finding the undercurrents of that tale. Finally, I talked about the similar structure of the three Dupin tales and their common concern with a woman of uncertain reputation, a concern reflecting Poe's effort to vindicate his mother, Eliza Poe—an effort that was successful, finally, in "The Purloined Letter." And I anticipated my more recent work on "The Gold-Bug" and "The Man of the Crowd." The students were attentive, focused, and they laughed in the right places.

I was happily surprised by the students' rapping their knuckles on their desks—a sign of approval that is the equivalent of applause but somehow, for me, more charming in its unexpectedness. Then, one student asked about the connection between Pym and Yann Martel's Life of Pi. (I acknowledged the connection and mentioned David Ketterer's article in Poe Studies.) Another asked about the significance of black and white in Pym. (I talked about race in that novel.) A third asked if there were work on the novel concerning the psychology of mourning. (I mentioned Kenneth Silverman's biography of Poe.) And a fourth asked the extent to which the albatrosses in Pym are suggestive of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner. (I responded that there was a very strong connection.) These were all great questions! I did have conversations with a few individual students before and after the class. One graduate student later told me that, in Switzerland, Poe is the most famous of the writers I was teaching, then Melville, then Hawthorne. Poe was especially celebrated for his tales of terror. She preferred Poe—he was the most exciting, most appealing. She liked the darkness in Poe—and the unknown in Pym. She was excited by the scholarly work I'd described...