Course Description
The fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: over forty short stories, one novel, and an imaginative inquiry into the life-cycle of the universe that he published in the last year of his life. The syllabus will also include books by some of the many writers who have responded to Poe in artistic form, or by some of Poe's most important contemporaries.
Athena Title
Edgar Allan Poe
Prerequisite
(Two 2000-level ENGL courses) or (one 2000-level ENGL course and one 2000-level CMLT course)
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Course Objectives
Over the course of the term, students in this class can expect to read the bulk of Edgar Allan Poe's fiction, as well as his book- length cosmogony, "Eureka," along with the work of two or three artists whose work, in the 20th and 21st centuries, has responded in a substantive fashion to Poe's example. Because Poe published most of his work originally in magazine form, students will present class reports on the changes that the artist introduced as he modified magazine texts for book publication. They will grow familiar with the instability or plasticity of Poe's stories, as well as with the artist's engagement with the volatile cultural climate of the United States between 1832 and 1849. The class will require a significant amount of writing: up to 25 pages of critical prose, in a mix of short and long formats, coupled with structured revision opportunities in which the student will respond to faculty editorial commentary to produce a more polished or more refined piece of writing as a final product of the class experience.
Topical Outline
In a major author class the governing "topic" is the title: Edgar Allan Poe. As different faculty teach the class, the emphasis may fall on a variety of sub-topics: Poe and Gender, Poe and Race, Poe and Science, Poe and the Magazine Culture of His Time, Poe and His Contemporaries (Emerson, Hawthorne, Irving). Any version of the class will touch to some degree on all of these possibilities, but individual instructors may elect to stress one as the chief interpretive lens of the reading.