Report // Stephen Rachman, “Pathoregimes: Poe, Pestilence, Space and Time,” 8 December 2023
Sari Altschuler (Northeastern) will be respondent.
This session will take place at Sorbonne Université, Bibliothèque de l’UFR d’études anglophones (esc. G, 2è étage; entrée par le 54 rue Saint Jacques ou le 17 rue de la Sorbonne, 75005 Paris).
Abstract: This paper examines space and time in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe that deal with pandemic disease. Recent studies of Poe in relation to place (e.g. Philip Phillips and Kennedy and McGann) have concentrated on contextualizing Poe’s oeuvre in terms of its human geographies, how places and spaces are manifested in his works, and how those works can be, in turn, mapped and re-mapped on to fictive, historical, actual, and imaginative locations. The ongoing pandemic has sensitized us anew to the ways in which Poe used cultural geography under the spatio-temporal pressures of epidemic disease. This essay will focus on the London of Poe’s “King Pest” and how it functions as a plague-induced interzone, an epicenter of epidemic disease. Through this analysis, the essay will demonstrate how miasmatic theories of pestilence drive the human geography in this story, as Poe’s language fixates upon local concentrations of loathsome decaying organic matter believed to be producing deadly disease. The essay will conclude with an examination of what Poe’s pestilential spatial logic has to teach us about modern pandemics and the meanings that pandemics produce.
Stephen Rachman is Director of the American Studies Program and Co-Director of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Laboratory at Michigan State University.
He is the editor of The Hasheesh Eater by Fitz-Hugh Ludlow (Rutgers University Press). He is a co-author of the award-winning Cholera, Chloroform, and the Science of Medicine: A Life of John Snow (Oxford University Press) and the co-editor of The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press). He has written numerous articles on Poe, literature and medicine, cities, popular culture, and an award-winning Web site on Sunday school books for the Library of Congress American Memory Project. He is a past president of the Poe Studies Association and currently completing a study of Poe entitled The Jingle Man: Edgar Allan Poe and the Problems of Culture.
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Thomas Constantinesco (20 novembre 2023). Friday, 8 December, 2pm, Bibliothèque d’anglais, Sorbonne Université / Zoom: Stephen Rachman (Michigan State), “Pathoregimes: Poe, Pestilence, Space and Time.” A19. Consulté le 22 avril 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/agxi