The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Japan
The Third Conference
Date: Sept. 18, Saturday, 2010
Hours: 10.00 a.m. -- 18.00 p.m.
Venue: S３０7 3rdF. Sotobori Building Hall, Hosei Univeristy
Program
Opening Ceremony 10:20 - 10:30
Opening Address: Prof. Takayuki Tatsumi, President of the Poe Society of Japan
Welcome from the Host University: Prof. Hideo Yuuki, President of the English Literary Society of Hosei University
（Room S307）
・Sessions 10:30 - 12:30 a.m.
Session I. Erica Udono, Aichi Prefecture University, Chair
Hiroyuki Tomiyama, Graduate Student of Keiogijyuku University
Session II. Hisayo Ogushi, Keiogijyuku University, Chair
Greg Bevan, Fukuoka University
“Predecessors and Parents Confronted: Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” and Bowles’ “In the Red Room”
Session III. Hisayo Ogushi, Keiogijyuku University, Chair
Namie Ozawa, Rissho University
“Poe’s Adventure Narrative on the New World: A Comparative Study of The Journal of Julius Rodman and The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition”
13: 30〜16: 00
Symposium: Shoko Itoh, Matsuyama University, Chair
“The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: Roaming beyond the uncharted waters of the Narrative”
Ken Nishizaki, Author “Horror in Poe and Poe in Horror”
Susumu Niijima, Keiogijyuku University “Pym and An Antarctic Mystery by Verne: On the Sexuality of the Two Authors”
Yukiko Oshima, Fukuoka University
“The Use and Exclusion of Dirk/Dark Peters”
Shoko Itoh, “Animal Representation and Gothic Nature in Pym”
16: 10〜17: 20
Special Lecture Nishiyama Tomonori, Saitama Gakuen University , Chair
Koji Ooi Kansaigakuinn University Emeritus
“Poe’s Income: Peeping into the Author’s Accounts-Book ”
General Meeting 17:30 - 18:00
Closing Address Shoko Itoh, Vice President of the Poe Society of Japan
18:30 - 20:30
Dinner Party: Arcadia ShigakuKaikan
Participation fee 6,000 yen (3,000 yen for students)
Contact Person：Miyakawa Tadashi
e-mail: miyab@hosei.ac.jp
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Abstracts of the Presentation Sessions
Hiroyuki Tomiyama
"Philadelphia Gothic: The Urban Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe and John Edgar Wideman"
With one of the largest and most influential free African American communities in the United States, Antebellum Philadelphia was the city that would serve as a decisive touchstone in the firestorm of controversy over slavery. Among many writers who wrote in this city are Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) and John Edgar Wideman (1941-). Though both writers were inspired by sensational incidents in Philadelphia such as the yellow fever crisis in 1793 or the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall in 1838, few critics have ever intensely investigated their works together. In April 2010, however, Samuel Otter’s landmark historicist study Philadelphia Stories: American Literature of Race and Freedom (Oxford UP) was published. Otter, covering extensive Philadelphia narratives, considers Philadelphia as a laboratory of social reforms. Employing Otter’s study, I examine the urban imagination of Edgar Allan Poe and John Edgar Wideman, especially in Gothic motifs.
Greg Bevan
“Predecessors and Parents Confronted: Poe’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’ and Bowles’ ‘In the Red Room’ ”
The influence of Edgar Allan Poe on the work of Paul Bowles (1910-1999) has been a salient question since the appearance of Bowles’ first story collection, which he dedicated to his mother because she had read him Poe’s stories in his childhood. “It wasn’t very good for sleeping—they gave me nightmares,” he said. “Maybe that’s what she wanted, who knows?” In the shocking violence and horror of Bowles’ early stories it is easy enough to find echoes of Poe. “The Delicate Prey,” for example, features a live burial scene that recalls Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.” But the lurid excess that mars Bowles’ debut collection suggests that he had not yet come to terms with his relationship to his predecessor (nor, considering the dedication, to his parents).
We again encounter the ghost of “The Cask of Amontillado” in a celebrated 1980 story by a much more mature Bowles. “In the Red Room” features obvious fictional stand-ins for Bowles and his elderly parents, and a brutal murder which—in contrast with the exhibitionism of Bowles’ early stories—the narrator learns about secondhand. The story is propelled by the same drive to confession as “The Cask of Amontillado,” but now Poe’s horror has been contained as a narrative within the story—paradoxically heightening its impact. (“In the Red Room” appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties.)
Through an analysis of both stories, this presentation will aim to elucidate the relationship of the 70-year-old Bowles, as he viewed it, toward both his parents and his nineteenth-century muse.
Namie Ozawa
“Poe’s Adventure Narrative on the New World: A Comparative Study of The Journal of Julius Rodman and The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition”
The Journal of Julius Rodman (1840) is an incomplete work of fiction that deserves criticism as a deficient work devoid of Gothic imagination, compared to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). This work is, however, paired with the latter fiction in that Rodman’s journey is a Gothic romance exploring the New World while Pym’s is an oceanic counterpart in quest of the Antarctic. Although the main source Poe depended on to make this fiction was The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, he created a hoax in which Rodman had already discovered the same route in 1791, around 10 years before Lewis and Clark did. This presentation compares Poe’s fiction and The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and clarifies what Poe selected and what he discarded from the source, thus revealing the dark imagination he unconsciously suppressed. What Poe stressed was ethereal beauty of nature, while what he concealed was rich culture of various native tribes Lewis and Clark encountered. Those tribes were to be driven away with the expansion of the American territory. Sacajawea, who accompanied the expedition and was married to a French-Canadian guide, was also deleted, and instead a native woman who kills her white husband is mentioned. Those suppressed images were overlapped with the facts the newly-founded republic sealed in the depth of its national narrative: the conquest of the New World and miscegenation with the natives.
