Unwinnable Wars, Unspeakable Wounds: Locating “The Man That Was Used Up”

Kennedy, J.M.

doi:10.1111/j.1754-6095.2006.tb00189.x

Poe Studies/Dark Romanticism

2006

DOI: 10.1111/j.1754-6095.2006.tb00189.x

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Unwinnable Wars, Unspeakable Wounds: Locating “The Man That Was Used Up”

J.M. Kennedy

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Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

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Body Politics in the Age of Mechanical Invention: A Cultural Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

吴¹

2016

WLS

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In his short story "The Man That Was Used Up", American classical writer Edgar Allan Poe presents a popular figure General John A. B. C. Smith who, after having been dismembered in the Indian War, not only reconstructs himself into an amazingly fine-looking man with the help of prosthetic devices, but also gains political and socializing capitals with his war experience. As a cultural code of the particular historical moment, his assembled body not only reveals the craze for technological products, but also reflects the way the white Americans viewed the frontier conflict. The huge discrepancy between Smith's sublime body and his mutilated flesh actually becomes a perfect case with which Poe mocks the self-adulation and pompous arrogance of the political world and the fetishism of technological products in the American society.

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Body Politics in the Age of Mechanical Invention: A Cultural Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

吴¹

2016

WLS

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The Posthumanist Technological Sublime as Cultural Technique: Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

Sommerfeld

2018

Zeitschrift Für Anglistik Und Amerikanistik

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This essay argues for exploring sublimity as a cultural technique which is central to processing modern practices of purification and hybridization alike, and which also self-reflexively illuminates the operations and actors of its surrounding human-nonhuman network. The dissection and literal assemblage of a romantic cyborg in “The Man That Was Used Up” serves as an example of how Poe’s self-referential employment of a posthumanist technological sublime counteracts anthropocentric notions of Romantic sublimity which reduce Nature to a means of human arousal and self-elevation.

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Interview with J. Gerald Kennedy: October 11, 2016, Baltimore, Maryland

Cantalupo

2017

The Edgar Allan Poe Review

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Unwinnable Wars, Unspeakable Wounds: Locating “The Man That Was Used Up”

Cited by 3 publications

References 9 publications

Body Politics in the Age of Mechanical Invention: A Cultural Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

Body Politics in the Age of Mechanical Invention: A Cultural Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

The Posthumanist Technological Sublime as Cultural Technique: Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up”

Interview with J. Gerald Kennedy: October 11, 2016, Baltimore, Maryland

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