Melville, Poe, and American Modernity

Catalog description

The class will be guided by the premise that the writings of Poe and Melville reflect mid-19th century modernity.To support this claim we will look into their experimentation with narrative structure and ask whether the absence of clearly delineated characters in their stories is related to the emergence of urban crowds, practices of dehumanization employed in New York and Philadelphia prisons and hospitals.