On his book The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City
Cover Interview of May 12, 2021
The wide angle
At an American Literature conference about eight years ago,
I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that
what the field of Poe biography had overlooked was the fact of Poe’s
itinerancy. Poe changed addresses on average about once a year throughout his
life. It’s not that we didn’t know this, but I don’t think Poe scholars or
biographers had really thought much about what it means—how moving from house
to house, city to city, might be a defining feature of his life. When I wrote
that paper, I felt like I had the beginning of a new kind of Poe biography. “No
Place Like Home” became the title of the book’s introduction, and the idea of
being on the move became a strong motif alongside the central idea of the city.
The concept of place as explored by humanistic geographers
has inspired a lot of work in literary studies over the past ten or twenty
years. That scholarship usually involves questions about how meaning is
constructed through place, both in literary works with a strong sense of
location and in the lives of writers. Poe scholars have approached “place” in a
variety of ways—fictional, symbolic places like the House of Usher or the
torture chamber of “The Pit and Pendulum”, but also the question of Poe’s own
sense of place and what it might mean for his fiction and poetry. This new wave
of interest in place culminated in a collection of essays entitled Poe and
Place, edited by Philip Phillips and published in 2018. I contributed an
essay to that volume that in some ways previewed The Man of the Crowd; a
discussion of Poe as a man on the move, and the difficulties of associating him
too closely with any single place.
More broadly, I believe most Poe scholars see themselves as
myth debunkers, because in popular culture Poe tends to be seen as a man who
lived in a world of his own imagination, either on drugs or just intoxicated by
his own misery and creativity. But there’s a lot of scholarship that emphasizes
the various ways Poe was engaged with the social problems, the politics, the
economics of the antebellum U.S., and I’ve drawn heavily on that scholarship in
The Man of the Crowd. The book isn’t really a study in genius but more
of a reality tour of Poe’s America.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
At an American Literature conference about eight years ago, I presented a paper with the title “No Place Like Home”, which proposed that what the field of Poe biography had overlooked was the fact of Poe’s itinerancy. Poe changed addresses on average about once a year throughout his life. It’s not that we didn’t know this, but I don’t think Poe scholars or biographers had really thought much about what it means—how moving from house to house, city to city, might be a defining feature of his life. When I wrote that paper, I felt like I had the beginning of a new kind of Poe biography. “No Place Like Home” became the title of the book’s introduction, and the idea of being on the move became a strong motif alongside the central idea of the city.
The concept of place as explored by humanistic geographers has inspired a lot of work in literary studies over the past ten or twenty years. That scholarship usually involves questions about how meaning is constructed through place, both in literary works with a strong sense of location and in the lives of writers. Poe scholars have approached “place” in a variety of ways—fictional, symbolic places like the House of Usher or the torture chamber of “The Pit and Pendulum”, but also the question of Poe’s own sense of place and what it might mean for his fiction and poetry. This new wave of interest in place culminated in a collection of essays entitled Poe and Place, edited by Philip Phillips and published in 2018. I contributed an essay to that volume that in some ways previewed The Man of the Crowd; a discussion of Poe as a man on the move, and the difficulties of associating him too closely with any single place.
More broadly, I believe most Poe scholars see themselves as myth debunkers, because in popular culture Poe tends to be seen as a man who lived in a world of his own imagination, either on drugs or just intoxicated by his own misery and creativity. But there’s a lot of scholarship that emphasizes the various ways Poe was engaged with the social problems, the politics, the economics of the antebellum U.S., and I’ve drawn heavily on that scholarship in The Man of the Crowd. The book isn’t really a study in genius but more of a reality tour of Poe’s America.