Poe Flashcards
Tell-Tale Heart: sublime
terror
Tell-Tale Heart: community/identity
displaced identity; the self hard to extricate from the old man (and eventually even from the reader) a merging of identities to terrifying effect.
Tell-Tale Heart: genre
Still a murder/detective story, but inverse example (published after first two Dupin stories)
Tell-Tale Heart: narrative features
Unreliable narrator
Tell-Tale Heart: Published in
The Pioneer: A Literary and Critical Magazine
Tell-Tale Heart: originally there was an epigraph with a quote from …. (about?)
Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life”; stanza on hearts as funeral marches, beating toward the grave
Tell-Tale Heart: “What you mistake for madness is but
over acuteness of the senses.”
Tell-Tale Heart: quote, the Old Man’s “Evil Eye” and “The beating…”
“of his hideous heart”
Tell-Tale Heart: quote, about the Old Man’s groan of terror from the bed: “Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, …”
“it has welled up from my own bosom.”
Tell-Tale Heart: talking point, sympathy, perspective
Radically misguided sympathy—a confusion of perspectives: the Old Man’s groan of terror from the bed: “Many a night, just at midnight, when all the world slept, it has welled up from my own bosom” (also identity)
Rue Morgue: published when
1841
Rue Morgue: science, perspectives, empiricism
- Dupin: seeing the different perspectives; doesn’t shut down ideas because they don’t conform to normal heuristics (SEE speech on method)
- Empiricism: reconstructing the situation
Tell-Tale Heart: theme, underlying idea, America
DH Lawrence thought the American psyche was crumbling—guilt over treatment of the indigenous—Poe is perversely interested in watching his psyche crumble (cf. evil eye)
Rue Morgue: founds the following topoi in detective fiction
- eccentric but brilliant detective
- bumbling constables (as foil to detective)
- 1st person narration by close personal friend
- 1st locked room mystery in detective fiction
- detective announcing solution and then explaining the reasoning leading up to it
Rue Morgue: published where
Appears in Graham’s Magazine (fashion, literature, romance, art) in 1841 while Poe works as editor
Rue Morgue: later republished as a
pamphlet
Rue Morgue: has a serialized ______
sequel
Rue Morgue: one of the earliest of Poe’s works to be translated into
French
Rue Morgue: Dupin quotes from Rousseau’s _____ __ __ ___ ______
Julie, or the New Heloise
Rue Morgue: Dupin quotes from Roussea’s Julie, or the New Heloise, “to deny…”
“to deny that which is, and explore that which is not”
Poe is born
1809
Poe dies
1849
House of Usher: published when
1839
House of Usher: hierarchy, center
examining a hierarchy founded on a dead center; part of the gothic tradition; “We have put her living in the tomb!”
House of Usher: history, past, memory
They read texts from days of romance
House of Usher: sublime
terror
House of Usher: the house, double meaning
the house has double-meaning in minds of peasantry: Gothic House and Aristocratic Family Line; the building itself a mingling of perfection and decay
House of Usher: tone
gray, gloomy, dreary
House of Usher: Roderick and Lady Madeline
Usher twins. Both suffer the exact same illness, a “Morbid acuteness of the senses”
House of Usher: meta-text, foreshadowing
Roderick’s verses of “The Haunted Palace” about the fall of a great house
House of Usher: narrator and Roderick read a series of books on the
science and mythology of the occult
House of Usher: to calm Roderick, narrator reads
“Mad Trist,” a romance tale
House of Usher: published where
Burton’s (gentlemen’s magazine)
House of Usher: “No portion of the _______ had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of _____, and the utterly porous, and evidently decayed condition of ________ stones.”
masonry; parts; individual
House of Usher: like the narrator of Tell-Tale Heart, the brother and sister suffer from
“Morbid acuteness of the senses.”
