Jonathan Elmer - "In Poe's Wake" - Jennifer L. Fleissner

Jonathan Elmer will discuss In Poe's Wake: Travels in the Graphic and the Atmospheric. He will be joined in conversation by Jennifer L. Fleissner. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op

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About the book: You’ll find his face everywhere, from coffee mugs, bobbleheads, and T-shirts to the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Edgar Allan Poe is one of American culture’s most recognizable literary figures, his life and works inspiring countless derivations beyond the literary realm: illustration and kitsch, art installations, films, radio plays, children’s cartoons, and video games. What makes Poe so hugely influential in media other than his own? What do filmmakers, composers, and other artists find in Poe that suits their purposes so often and so variously?

In Poe’s Wake locates the source of the writer’s enduring legacy in two vernacular aesthetic categories: the graphic and the atmospheric. Jonathan Elmer uses Poe to explore these two terms and track some deep patterns in their use. Poe’s writings are violent and macabre, memorable both for certain grisly images and for certain prevailing moods or atmospheres—dread, creepiness, and mournfulness. Furthermore, a bundle of Poe traits—his thematic emphasis on extreme sensation, his flexible sense of form, his experimental and modular method, and his iconic visage—amount to what could be called a Poe “brand,” one as likely to be found in music videos or comics as in novels and stories. 

About the author: Jonathan Elmer is professor of English at Indiana University. He is author of Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe and On Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World.

About the interlocutor: Jennifer L. Fleissner is professor of English at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Women, Compulsion, Modernity: The Moment of American Naturalism and Maladies of the Will: The American Novel and the Modernity Problem, both published by the University of Chicago Press.