In Poe's Wake

"Edgar Allan Poe is one of American culture's most iconic figures, inspiring countless derivations beyond the literary realm, from commercial illustration and kitch to art installations and video games. Why has Poe been 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? Poe's works are violent and brooding, memorable both for certain grisly images and for certain prevailing moods-dread, creepiness, mournfulness. They are, in other words, distinctly graphic and richly atmospheric. Jonathan Elmer locates the source of Poe's fascination for artists in these two vernacular aesthetic categories-the graphic and the atmospheric-and how well they describe our experience of the multi-media world. Elmer uses Poe to explore these two terms and track some deep patterns in their use, not through theoretical labor but through close encounters with a wide sampling of aesthetic objects that avail themselves of Poe's work. Poe, we learn, has come to exemplify a modern method of aesthetic production. It is as if he left his box of tools lying around for others to pick up and play with. The bundle of Poe traits-his thematic emphasis on extreme sensation, his flexible sense of form, his experimental and modular method, his iconic personal profile-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. Ranging from Renâe Magritte and Claude Debussy to Lou Reed, Roger Corman, and Spongebob Squarepants, Elmer shows how the Poe brand opens trunk lines to aesthetic experiences fundamental to a multi-media world"--