English 150

Other Readings and Media

Hayes, K. ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe; Kennedy, J. G. and L. Weissberg, eds.: Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race; Nabokov, V.: Lolita; Poe. E. A.: Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays; Poe, E. A.: The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe; Quinn, A. H.: Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography; Rosenheim, S. and S. Rachman, eds.: The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe; photocopied course reader, available at Copy Central, 2560 Bancroft Way

Description

We will immerse ourselves in Edgar Allan Poe's career: poetry, tales, comic satires and grotesques, essays, and reviews. We will discuss issues of aesthetics, style, genre, humor, politics, authorship, gender, sexuality, and race. We will consider Poe in the context of his contemporaries: fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Lippard, Herman Melville, and Harriet Prescott Spofford; poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sarah Helen Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. We will chart Poe's legacy in poetry by Hart Crane; fiction by Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Chesnutt, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges; and films by Alfred Hitchcock and Roger Corman. Course requirements include an oral presentation and a substantial research essay to be written in stages across the semester.