COML675 - Poe's French Legacies

Edgar Allan Poe was considered a vulgar hack by many of his fellow Americans, but in 19th-century France, he was touted as an ill-fated poetic genius, the original poete maudit. Through the translations and biographical essays of Charles Baudelaire, who found in Poe a kindred spirit in the "gout de l'infini," French intellectuals came to know the American writer as a model of compositional lucidity and morbid mastery. From his inklings of an urban modernity in "The Man in the Crowd" to the nevrotic perversity of "Berenice," Poe's aesthetics have cast an influential shadow on French culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, we will explore in this course the many literary and artistic movements in France that were directly inspired by Poe's uncanny mix of the macabre and the methodical: Symbolist poetry (Valery, Mallarme), the Scientific Fantastic (Maupassant, Villers de l'Isle-Adam), fin-de-siecle Decadence (Huysmanns,Odilon Redon), Science Fiction, (Verne), the detective novel (Gaboriau), and 20th-century Surrealism (Breton, Max Ernst).