ENG 271 Crime&Punish in Poe's America

In the 1840s—when he wrote such famous works as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and “The Black Cat”—Edgar Allan Poe was living just a short walk from a state-of-the-art Philadelphia prison. Founded on humanitarian ideals of reform rather than punishment, the Eastern State Penitentiary emphasized work, routine, prayer, and solitude instead of bodily correction. Some praised the ESP as a prison for a more enlightened and benevolent age; but English novelist Charles Dickens, on visiting the prison in 1842, witnessed a “ghastly…tampering with the mysteries of the brain…worse than any torture of the body.” Critics tend to see Poe as the “odd man out” of the American literary tradition, sharing few of the defining concerns of contemporaries like Emerson, Whitman, Stowe, and Hawthorne. Indeed, many see him as a man before his time, offering in his work insights into the human mind that anticipate twentieth-century psychoanalysis. But in this course, we’ll make Poe speak to our world by making better sense of him in his world. We’ll come to see Poe as a writer active in the cultural debates—such as those over prison reform—that shaped modern America. We’ll see Poe’s poems, essays, and tales as casting light on the mysteries and horrors of his America—and our own. (C2) 

Credits

4