Apokalyptische Kammermusik – Edgar Allan Poe dichtet den Schiffbruch, Alfred Kubin zeichnet ihn
Apocalyptic Chamber Musik – Edgar Allan Poe Composes a Story about a Shipwreck, Alfred Kubin Draws It

Summary/Abstract: Stories about adventures at sea offer an exemplary scheme for modern heroic narratives – they provide the bourgeois world with the longed-for ›metaphors for existence‹ (Blumenberg), which certify its cultural superiority, economic vigor, masculine determination, and technical efficiency. E. A. Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, irritates this indestructible optimism with its poetic profession to the end of the world. In an elegiac suite to apocalyptic experience, failure is varied until it finally succeeds, and is experienced by its participants in a state of almost lustful apathy. In the ink drawings by Alfred Kubin, the diffuse lure of the apocalypse finds its congenial counterpart.

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