Sheley and Rosen on The Purloined Debtor: Edgar Allan Poe's Bankruptcy in Law and Letters @zvisrosen @erin_sheley

Erin L. Sheley, California Western School of Law, and Zvi S. Rosen, Southern Illinois University School of Law, are publishing The Purloined Debtor: Edgar Allan Poe's Bankruptcy in Law and Letters in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

This Article represents the first interdisciplinary case study of the Poe bankruptcy as an inflection point in the legal and cultural history of debt. It shows both how the pitfalls of a short, debtor-focused chapter in bankruptcy history gave rise to the system of today, and how Poe’s indebtedness and bankruptcy helped shape the American Gothic literary forms he made famous. Part One compares bankruptcy law in Poe’s time to that of today, also explaining how bankruptcy came to be and why it was revolutionary. Part Two presents a brief life of Poe and collects evidence of the literal and intellectual impact of the law on his life and thought. Turning to his literary work, it argues that Poe’s fixation on the relationship between debt, degeneration, and official naming reflects the impact of the burgeoning bankruptcy system on individual identity in a Gothic framework. Part Three explores Poe’s bankruptcy case from a technical legal perspective, both in the context of the law at the time and hindsight, showing that there were serious conflicts of interest in the case. We conclude by arguing that Poe’s case, read alongside his literary output, reveals both legal and narrative contradictions at the heart of bankruptcy, which the 1841 Act did a poor job of resolving. On the one hand, bankruptcy reframes the identity of the debtor, who becomes the object of a quasi-confessional process. On the other, bankruptcy restores some degree of material agency to the debtor as a subject, often at the expense of creditors.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

U. S. Copyright Office Hosts "Quoth the Raven: Edgar Allan Poe & Derivative Works, October 29, 2019 @CopyrightOffice

The U.S. Copyright Office is hosting the Copyright Matters event "Quoth the Raven: Edgar Allan Poe & Derivative Works" on October 29, at 10:00 a.m. eastern time, in the Montpelier Room, Library of Congress Madison Building, in Washington, DC.

During this event, the Office will discuss Poe's advocacy for copyright law, the breadth of his impact, and the many derivative works Poe has inspired. More than 300 comic book adaptations of Poe's work exist, plus many works use Poe's characters as an inspiration. Moreover, Poe was a strong advocate for copyright protections, especially in the international arena.

After a brief introduction and recitation of The Raven, featured speakers will talk about Poe, his life, his artistry, and the many creative works spawned by his creations. Speakers include Christopher Semtner, curator of the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia; Enrica Jang, executive director of The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore; and Thad Ciechanowski, owner of Dijit Media and filmmaker, director, and editor.

Please visit the Copyright Office website to register for the event and to stay up-to-date about this program and speakers. Request ADA accommodations five business days in advance at (202) 707-6362 or at ada@loc.gov.

Oseid on What Lawyers Can Learn From Edgar Allan Poe @USTLawMN

Julie A. Oseid, University of St. Thomas (Minnesota) Law School, has published What Lawyers Can Learn from Edgar Allan Poe at 15 Legal Comm. & Rhetoric: JAWLD 233 (2018). Here is the abstract.

Treat yourself to a spine-tingling Edgar Allan Poe sensation by reading about the synergy between stories of horror and legal writing. Poe defined a short-story writing technique and named four qualities — brevity, unity, focus, and brilliant style — as critical. These exact same qualities are familiar to lawyers because they are just as critical for persuasive briefs. This article examines Poe’s critique of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, reviews some of Poe’s own work, and applies Poe’s advice about great short-story writing to legal writing.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Popularity of the World's First Consulting Detective... In Charts!

Sherlock Holmes through the data, by Adam Frost and James Kynvin.

Does statistical evidence takes the fun out of it for you?

BTW, this isn't the first time Messrs Frost and Kynvin have sussed out data to try to figure out the whys of events. Here's their take on the likelihood of winning the Mann Booker Prize.

And here is how Mr. Frost, Mr. Kynvin, and Jamie Lenman diagram Edgar Allan Poe's macabre death scenes.  Fun for the whole family!

Edgar Allan Poe, Gothic Horror, and the Development of US Criminal Law

Laura I. Appleman, Willamette University College of Law, is publishing Gothic Stories, Mens Rea, and Nineteenth Century American Criminal Law in The Ashgate Research Companion to Law and Humanities In Nineteenth-Century America (Nan Goodman and Simon Stern eds., Ashgate Press, 2015)(forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

The early-to-mid nineteenth century was a turbulent period for the cities of an expanding America. Beginning in the 1830’s, it was a time of “epic homicidal riots,” which prompted the creation of the first urban police force. The rise of the police helped reduce the rates of homicide dramatically. Concomitant with the explosion of real-life murder and the rise of the first police force was also a particular renaissance moment for gothic storytelling, focusing in large part on the wily criminal and the deductive reasoning used by these early police to track, apprehend and convict these offenders. What influence did these tremendously popular stories have on the creation of 19th-century criminal law and the public’s understanding of the 19th-century criminal?

The most emblematic example of this fascination with American criminality, of course, was the writing of Edgar Allan Poe, whose Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in 1849. Close behind it in influence, however, was the gothic fiction of Washington Irving and short stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work beguiled a developing nation. These highly popular stories, steeped in mystery, psychology and potentially horrific crimes, were influential in the shaping of 19th-century criminal law and organized police forces, which rose hand in hand with the popular understanding of crime-solving.

There were many links between 19th-century gothic/criminal fiction and the intellectual development of 19th-century American criminal law. One example is the rise of new narrative techniques in 19th-century fiction in developing character studies, including third-person narrative forms, and the concomitant development of mens rea analysis (i.e., that liability for wrongdoing should not just be based on sheer “wickedness,” but on actual intent to commit a specific crime). As literary gothic fiction explored a new, more complex understanding of why a criminal defendant might act the way he did, this matched — and undoubtedly influenced — the way the legal understanding of mens rea became more refined, shifting from a simple finding of general wrongdoing to a more sophisticated, elemental approach. This book chapter explores the similarities and cross-pollination between the two.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

The Visual, French History, and Virtual Memory

Daniel Maxwell Sussner has published "Projections: The visual structure of French history," a dissertation in partial completion of the requirements for the PhD at Harvard University. Here is the abstract.

How do visual media structure historical thinking? In the context of collective memory, this essay argues that engraving, the daguerreotype and film organize how historians make sense of the past. Specifically, analogizing from the digital technique of "virtual memory," the simulation of contiguous accessible digital memory available to efficiently manage computer programs, this essay shifts direction away from studies employing visual material to illustrate arguments or demonstrate historical meaning. Instead, virtual memory explains how visual media (re)organize memory, staging a collective dreaming of the past. "History," Tocqueville reminds us, "indeed, is like a picture gallery in which there are few originals and many copies."

Three hypotheses underscore this applied mechanics of thinking visually: (1) visual media displace aspects of human memory; (2) copyright law politically empowers visual media; and (3) visual media virtualize collective memory. Each chapter advances a case study elaborating a visual medium's organization of collective memory in techniques specific to its mode of reproduction Chapter One, in detailing the decline of the ancíen regime, explains the emergence of a public visual space for engraving as the collective mediation of political representation. Chapters Two, Three and Four consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the French Revolution together, not simply in terms of direct or retrospective impact, but as the fruition of commemorative practices indelibly linked to Rousseau's obsession with the communication of visual memory. Rousseau's "memory project" engaging the engraving medium to organize key moments of his complete works, provided readers with the mnemonic tools to virtualize Rousseau's collective memory. Chapter Five frames the emergence of the daguerreotype, emphasizing the transition from engraving to new historical modes of virtual memory. The focus here will be a now-forgotten trial involving French plagiarisms of Edgar Allen Poe. Finally. Chapter Six explores the medium of film. From the internal struggle between content and medium to the ineluctable complicity between moviegoers and historians in ascribing objectivity to fictional films about the past, cinema has much to teach us. In particular. Alain Resnais changes the rules of the game: if earlier visual media structure collective memory, the point of film is to smash it.

His advisor is Patrice Higonnet.

Update: For those interested in obtaining dissertations, they are generally available from University Microfilms International.