Recovering the Purloined Letter

College of Arts and Sciences
Department of English Language and Literature
University of South Carolina
Recovering the Purloined Letter
From Sheep Stealing to Sexual Immorality
MORRISON FELLOW LECTURE
Leon Jackson, Associate Professor of English
Since the publication of Lacan’s
“Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”
in 1966, Edgar Allan Poe’s short
story has been an incubator for
innovative readings, ranging from
the psychoanalytic to the historicist.
It is something of an irony that
the one element of the story to
escape scrutiny is the blackmail
plot at its core. Jackson will offer
a new reading of Poe’s story in
context of the nineteenth-century
practice of blackmail, while situating
that practice in turn in its own
millennium-long, tawdry history.
WEDNESDAY
March
25
The University of South Carolina is an equal opportunity institution.
3:45 p.m.
HUMCB 304
(Humanities Classroom Building)
RECEPTION TO FOLLOW