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André, Theatricality, and the Time of Revolution
(Cambridge University Press, 2019) Elmer, Jonathan
In her excellent study Anglophilia, Elisa Tamarkin reveals a widespread fascination in antebellum America with being“lost in the indeterminate worlds of colonial loyalties.” She describes the“uneven temporality of national experience,”in which“American independence simply feels like the vertiginous capacity to be both nationalistic and nostalgic for our antenational relations”(148). In these reveries, the colonial past is not repudiated or sloughed off, but rather virtualized as an imaginative keep-sake. Instead of a definitive new order, from which there is no turning back, the revolution installs an“uneven temporality.” Independence with-out revolution: history is what doesn’t hurt.
Enduring and Abiding
(Indiana University Press, 2009) Elmer, Jonathan
By the time I delivered the ideas in this chapter, in September 2006, in a dowdy wood-paneled "conference room" in a bowling alley in Louisville, Kentucky, during the annual Lebowski Fest held in the city and at those lanes, everything had been said. Mine was the final paper, and during the previous two days the film had been turned upside down and shaken, and then carefully situated with regard to fluctuations in the L.A. real estate market, the subgenre ofbowling noir, the Brunswick color palette, nihilism and fluids, Paul de Man and Rip Van Winkle. Everything had been said, some things multiple times, and everyone was happy. Most people were happy. It became apparent to many of us that the film did not suffer from this critical vulturism, that the conversation could go on, potentially forever, without it being a problem that we were repeating ourselves and offering quite obviously contradictory views on many important aspects of the movie. The chatter did not exhaust the film, did not debase it or use it up, but it did not really exalt it either. The ability of the film to sustain such conversation was not due to its being a "classic," timeless or otherwise. It seemed, rather, that the film was not so much full of a complexity that needed endless "unpacking" -this despite the fact that The Big Lebowski, like all the Coen brothers' movies, lavishes loving, even obsessive, attention on all its details-than it was offering itself as genially underdetermined, available for any and all projections, investments, analyses, even mimicries.
John Neal and John Dunn Hunter
(Bucknell University Press, 2012) Elmer, Jonathan
Late in his 1869 autobiography, Wandering Recollections of a Somewhat Busy Life, John Neal introduces a distinction that might seem important in any autobiography. Substantial truth is not the same thing as circumstantial truth, Neal asserts, and the former is clearly more important, not least because attaining the latter is well-nigh impossible. He illustrates with an odd little story. Neal’s final word choice here invites reflection on how this story emblematizes his entire autobiographical endeavor, those “wandering recollections.” While John Dunn Hunter’s role may initially appear merely incidental to Neal’s substantial point, it is not. Nearly a half-century after meeting John Dunn Hunter in London in 1823, Neal is still working through the issues Hunter’s life and story brought up for him.
Poe and the Avant Garde
(Oxford University Press, 2019) Elmer, Jonathan
Poe’s influence on both avant-garde and mass-cultural production has been puzzling for many. This is because “avant-garde” has been restricted to whatever opposes aesthetic commodification and the culture industry. Placing Poe’s work in the context of nineteenth century physiological aesthetics helps explain Poe’s profound influence on “experimental arts,” whether avant-garde or commercial. Focused on anomalies of attention and the separation of sense modalities, Poe’s texts model and incite experimentation in media other than his own. Using hearing and vision as a red thread, this chapter will advance this argument through reference to visual works by Odilon Redon, Harry Clarke, and Carlo Farneti.
Poe, Plagiarism and the Prescriptive Right of the Mob
(Indiana University Press, 1993) Elmer, Jonathan
I begin with an unavoidable and entirely uncontroversial thesis: "William Wilson" (1839) is a psychological drama about the harassments of conscience. The thesis is uncontroversial because it seems to be the accepted interpretation of the tale; for this reason alone, one could argue, it must inevitably be taken into account! But it is unavoidable for a more immediate reason as well, namely, that we cannot enter the tale without first encountering the epigra ph Poe places at its threshold, and which imprints with typographical insistence the word "CONSCIENCE" on our reading memory: "What say of it? what say of CONSClENCE grim, /That spectre in my path?" Although the word "conscience" does not reappear in the rest of the tale , it will henceforth be almost impossible to understand the narrator's double as anything other than his conscience: the double does, in fact, turn out to be rather humorless and "grim ," and his meddlesome behavior certainly justifies his designation as "That spectre in [the narrator's] path." Before detailing all the thematic elements which support such an understanding, however, we should note that our interpretation of "William Wilson" as a story about conscience has in an important way been determined in advance. In thus affecting our access to the tale, the epigraph has, as it were, intervened from without; and in this sense the epigraph itself is a "spectre in [our ] path," one which will be as hard to evade as Wilson's double.

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