Paul Hurh Presents “The Raven and the Tomahawk: Poe, Poetry, and the Rise of Popular Criticism"

Thursday, September 24, 2015 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm
Poetry Center - Helen S. Schaefer Building 1508 East Helen Street (At Vine Avenue) Tucson, AZ 85721 United States

Join us for a lecture, “The Raven and the Tomahawk: Poe, Poetry, and the Rise of Popular Criticism,” delivered by UA Associate Professor Paul Hurh, whose new book, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford University Press, 2015), explores literary aesthetics, philosophy, and intellectual history.

Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, author, critic, innovator. Known best as a master of the mysterious and macabre, he has become an American literary icon, and his work continues to captivate and inspire readers, writers, and performers of all ages and walks of life.

Presented in partnership with The Big Read Tucson, a program of the National Endowment of the Arts.

The Big Read Connects Tucson is a community celebration and exploration of Edgar Allan Poe and his work. Join us from September 2015 through May 2016 for a host of exciting and diverse events, programs and activities designed to bring Poe to life for all.

Big Read Connects Tucson is brought to you by Literacy Connects through a Big Read grant. The Big Read is an NEA program managed by Arts Midwest to broaden our understanding of our world, our community and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book or the work of a great poet. Learn more at www.neabigread.org.

Paul Hurh is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Arizona, where he has taught since 2008.  Situated primarily in the field of nineteenth-century American literature, Hurh’s research has focused on questions of literary aesthetics, philosophy, and intellectual history.   His book, American Terror: The Feeling of Thinking in Edwards, Poe, and Melville (Stanford University Press, forthcoming 2015), charts the relation between models of Enlightenment method and the development of literary terror as a philosophical affect.  His current project considers nineteenth-century American literature within the new philosophy of speculative realism and includes studies of Edgar Allan Poe’s astronomical aesthetics, spacetime in Herman Melville, and scalar rifts in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  His essays have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Style, and Novel.