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