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- Title
Finding Poe's "Rotten Point": Usher's Architectural Phrenology.
- Authors
Tavlin, Zachary
- Abstract
In this article, I will consider "The Fall of the House of Usher" as an architectural manifesto but one that conceives of "architecture" as an environmental pseudo-science with links to nineteenth-century theories of phrenology and physiognomy. Poe's architectural "manifesto" operates on a number of levels--including on the lived body--as he hypothesizes diagnosable links between built environments and subjective-physiological structures. I will thus draw out a dialectical concept amenable to Poe's metaphysical, literary, and medical designs: the notion of an "architectural phrenology" that joins seemingly disparate scales of human thought and activity in order to diagnose our condition within a universe violently opposed to the continuation of our mental, corporeal, and communal identifications.
- Subjects
ONTOLOGY; METAPHYSICS; PHRENOLOGY; AESTHETICS; REALISM; PHILOSOPHY
- Publication
Edgar Allan Poe Review, 2017, Vol 18, Issue 2, p125
- ISSN
2150-0428
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.5325/edgallpoerev.18.2.0125