No other major writer from nineteenth-century United States has influenced contemporary global culture more than Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s legacy is alive and well in the 21st century. He pioneered and mastered popular genres such as the horror story and detective fiction. He tapped into the human subconscious well before Freud. He brought romantic poetry to new heights with “The Raven,” while his tumultuous and tragic biography has never failed to fascinate new generations of readers. This course will familiarize you with these and other less-known dimensions of Poe (as satirist, cryptographer, cultural commentator). Our goal is to situate Poe’s work in the context of antebellum United States, paying attention to how the market revolution, slavery, urbanization, and mass culture shaped Poe’s creations. At the same time, and no less importantly, we will use Poe to rethink the present moment. Here, the question is: what do Poe’s macabre tales, clockwork poetry, and intellectual mind games tell us about the world we inhabit? As we strive for an answer, we will take up themes such as individualism, violence, fantasy, racism, gender, technology, and the culture industry.