Poe's French Legacies

Catalog description

Edgar Allan Poe was considered a vulgar hack by many of his fellow Americans, but in 19th-century France, he was touted as a misunderstood poetic genius, the original poete maudit. Through the translations 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 fount of aesthetic wisdom, diabolical sensibility, and mystic mastery. In this course, we will study Baudelaire's poetry as well as 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, Villiers 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).