Lunchtime Talks at The Rosenbach: Andrea Goulet on Poe’s French Legacies

Topic

Andrea Goulet on 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 poète maudit.  Through the translations and biographical essays of Charles Baudelaire, who found in Poe a kindred spirit in the “goût de l’infini,” French intellectuals came to know the American writer as a model of compositional lucidity and morbid mastery.  Beginning with Baudelaire, this talk will survey some of the literary and artistic movements in France that were directly inspired by Poe’s uncanny mix of the macabre and the methodical:  Symbolist poetry (Valéry, Mallarmé), the Scientific Fantastic (Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam), fin-de-siècle Decadence (Huysmanns, Odilon Redon), Science Fiction (Verne), the detective novel (Gaboriau), and 20th-century Surrealism (Breton, Max Ernst).

About the Speaker

Andrea Goulet is Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Co-Chair of the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Association.  She is the author of Optiques: the Science of the Eye and the Birth of Modern French Fiction (Penn, 2006) and Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Space and Science in French Crime Fiction (Penn, 2016) and co-editor of Orphan Black: Performance, Gender, Biopolitics (Intellect Press, 2018).

Sponsor

Lunchtime Talks at The Rosenbach are sponsored by Lenore Steiner and Perry Lerner.

About Lunchtime Talks at The Rosenbach

New! Enjoy In Conversation Programs at midday with leading scholars, artists, and authors talking about their work. Light refreshments are provided!

Seating is limited; advance registration is strongly recommended.