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Urban Spectacle and Spectatorship in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”
Ya-Ju Yeh
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2019.09.001
Aletheia University, Taiwan
Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Man of the Crowd” delineates metropolitan visual experiences that relate to urban scenery and people. The anonymous first-person narrator, preoccupied with the social and psychological correlations between the city and wandering crowd, interprets his perception of the crowd as an inexhaustible spectacle. As the narrator experiences different phases of spectatorship, he ultimately realizes the inscrutability and impenetrability of the city through his observation of the old man of the crowd. This paper suggests that the narrator’s failure in seeing and reading the old man of the crowd renders an uncanny effect of urban spectatorship.
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd”, spectacle, spectatorship, the crowd, the uncanny
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