The Raven

Thursday, November 7, 2002

The Raven

Welcome to Term Papers Online. This page offers an expert essay on Edgar Allen Poe's The Raven. The authors remind you that academic plagiarism is severely frowned upon and this work should not be copied in toto for submission in fulfillment of any English or literature course requirements.

The Raven: A Critical Analysis

Time has not been kind to Edgar Allen Poe, partly because he is now dead, and chiefly because his works have failed to stand the test of modern literary perspectives. What measure of interest remains in Poe stems not from what his poetry and fiction tell us of an irrelevant past, but from the light they shed on a modern enlightened society.

No discussion of Poe would be complete without an examination of his most often-published poem, The Raven. Bear in mind that Poe was the son of the wealthy industrialist Allen Poe, who had sent the young Edgar to the finest schools and military academies, inculcating him in the bellicose mindset appropriate to the scion of the military-industrial complex. Armed with the tools of an elitist education, Poe set out to co-opt authentic voices while parroting the credos of the ruling moneyed class.

The first stanza of The Raven demolishes any solidarity he could have expressed with the proletariat by positing a scholar as the protagonist:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—

The author thus distances himself from the laborers who slumber in exhaustion at this hour, and disempowers feminine perspectives by writing them out of the storyline. Need it be said that the "forgotten lore" of line 2 is obviously the product of ethnic intellectualism? Poe's imperialist bias degrades their contributions by patronizingly labeling them "quaint" and "curious," hallmarks of Victorian supremacy over the Third World.

Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—

In this stanza Poe's egoism erects the totality of minority insights and female legitimacy on their heads and knocks them down like a recalcitrant child churlishly scatters a tower of blocks. Precious tropical warmth, like that found on the thighs of brown-skinned women, is cruelly found to be "in vain"; Lenore, a proud Everywoman, is both silenced and "lost" thanks to the author's affinity with a patriarchic hegemony.

From the cited passages, notice that the rhyme scheme is trochaic (trope + archaic) and the metre is octameter acalectic (eight-fold bombastity)—Poe manages to straightjacket language itself into a White male power structure, unlike today's poetic voices that are liberated from such artificial constraints.

Quoth the Raven "Nevermore."

Because Poe's insecurity prevents him from embracing authentic voices and oral histories, not only does he strangle language with contrived elitist and classist symbolism, but in choosing an animal as the voice of the natural Other, he proclaims his dominance over Gaia and subjugates Mother Earth Herself. In that the raven is a black bird, Poe succumbs to the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and, instead of the harbinger of death, the raven portends the decline of Eurocentric literary colonialism.

6:05:51 PM

The Data Junkie

Fast, accurate Websurfing is an essential life skill, and one that most of us are developing. How quickly can you find out which Gabor starred in Gigi? Anything over 5 clicks and there's room to improve. Andy Inhatko once proposed a game called Web That Smut: "I can web that smut in 3 clicks!" Back in '95 it was a little tougher.

Like coming down off an amphetmine jag, getting out of a manic surfing session can be brutal. We've all been there—a routine search for airfares turned into instructions for wiring neon tubes into your PC box, which led to the relationship between salvaged amphorae and Swedish copyright law, taking you to design plans for a potato gun... And then you hit something unusual and you're scanning faster. Click. Click. Finally, you're just looking at pure design, hardly reading at all.

According to standard information processing theory, the short-term sensory register is a neural connection somewhere between your occipital lobe and your retinas. It can attend to an input for between 1/32 of a second and 3 seconds. Provided you keep the datum somewhere in that range, it won't even go into memory—like scanning a bookshelf for a title or searching a crowd for a familiar face.

After 2 or 3 hours of awestruck wandering through a Dreamweaver universe, something distracts you and you get up, feeling the shivers and trying to unclench your teeth and your eyes still aren't working right and you have to concentrate on the simple task of drinking a glass of water. Breathe deep, stretch... Go back for a little more.

Everything is clamoring for your attention now, isn't it? Drive down the road and there's all these signs, and the radio, and even the symbols on your dashboard are competing to somehow get through that 2 31/32-second window to interact with your mind and maybe get something to stick. TV and magazines are ruthless in this realm; sex, power, food, fear—the tendrils of the Other probe at your R-cortex looking for a way in. Do you brace your back against the door or do the Taoist Master backbend and let them wash over you without resistance?

Crawling into bed at last, having consumed so much information, how much of yourself is original content and how much has been placed there? Will your dreams be of your own design?

9:25:45 AM