3.0

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Just who was Edgar Allan Poe, and who is he today? This course explores how and why a multitude of 19th-century French writers constructed Poe as an author. Through selected works from Hugo, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Verne, to be read alongside Poe's original texts, we will study the means by which these figures projected uniquely French versions of this mysterious American writer the better to stake out their own literary revolutions. By exploring versification, translation, adaptation, and the role of the proper name, we will examine the broad literary history that underlies contemporary understandings of Poe. No knowledge of French is required.