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Poe’sLyricalMedia The Raven’s Returns Eliza Richards “The Raven” is usually understood as an exercise in containment. Critics have determined that its repetitive structures hold evidence of psychological trauma: over the loss of beloved women, the death of writing, slavery (“le noir!”), or modernity’s impingements, for example.1 In these readings, the poem’s highly elaborated, artificial mechanism evinces a protective response to shock rooted in compulsive repetition: the trauma is rehearsed but never escaped. Poe’s echo chamber institutes a clear and impermeable boundary between the poem and the world; there is no mistaking the fact that we have entered a circumscribed linguistic environment, and sometimes it seems that there is no escape: like the speaker, the reader remains under the shadow of the raven. For Daniel Hoffman, the poem transfers the author’s affliction to the reader; Poe alleviates his own affective overload “by making of [his] passions an intricate mechanism for the production of the effects of passion in another person’s soul—transferring from the Self to the Other both the anguish of self-torture and the sybaritic luxury of a sorrow passive and never-ending.” For Debra Fried, “The Raven” dramatizes an even more radical dead end. Building on the closed logic of the epitaph, Poe buries himself alive within his poem: “Becoming his own responding muse, Poe is repeatedly answered with the low and delicious word Death.” In Barbara Johnson ’s reading, “The Raven” stages an encounter with poetic language as such. Because the repetition of clichés evacuates meaning, “The Raven” makes plain that readers cannot tolerate a vacuum: “repetition engenders its own compulsion-­tosense . Poetry works because the signifier cannot remain empty—because, not in spite, of the mechanical nature of its artifice.” The reader is compelled to make sense precisely because it is not there, in the process understanding a basic fact about the function of poetic language.2 Broadly differing, these critics agree that “The Raven” operates according to an inevitable logic in which the reader or the speakerortheauthor,orallthree,isforcedtoconfrontanultimatelimit.Whether 200 Poe’s Lyrical Media | 201 personal or impersonal, psychological or linguistic, the enclosed poetic world of “The Raven” sucks the reader into a tautological encounter with what it contains. Something strange happens to this presumption of containment, however, when we broaden our interpretive context to include the many copycat poems inspired by “The Raven,” for the poem has persistently encouraged not only its own recitative repetition, but also its rewriting, in the form of parodies, imitations , and versions of all kinds. The point these imitations make is not how selfenclosed “The Raven” is, but how permeable, how reproducible, how allusive; how much it is like other forms of linguistic expression; how it is composed of previously existing materials. They demonstrate that it can be expanded upon, rebuilt , rewritten, and that it can be adapted to new visual and acoustic media and different cultural, political, and social circumstances. Considering “The Raven” within the context of the responses it has inspired suggests that its self-enclosed logic, if it exists at all, makes it particularly suited to circulating through and extending open communication networks. Readers and rewriters have long recognized , in other words, that “The Raven” is a medium or a means of communication first, and a record of a particular expression only as a model or example for readers to emulate. In “The Raven,” Poe wrote a poem that could circulate through a developing mass-media network, instructing readers about the communications terrain through which it travels. According to Walter Benjamin, the primary function of “art in the age of its technological reproducibility” is “to train human beings in the apperceptions and . . . vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.” Because of this primary function, “to an everincreasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.”3 Poe’s “Raven” trains readers in mass-media functions and encourages them to internalize that knowledge by rewriting the poem within their own media contexts. The poem’s reproducibility, not its originality, underpins its exceptional longevity and vast, self-perpetuating, international literary presence. Recently critics have developed new ways of reading literary works within the terms of their circulation and reception, displacing the author function as the center of critical practice. In Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (1995), Jonathan Elmer initiated this trend in Poe studies by reading Poe as a “symptom” as well...

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