After reading Poe’s famous short story, “The Man of the Crowd,” discuss what you think is the “point” or “purpose” of Poe’s story. Written in the early 1840s, Poe’s short story was published in a time when the modern experience of large urban cities like London and New York was becoming the dominate mode of everyday life. As thematically emphasized last week with Irving’s tales, the shift away from agrarian village life to industrialized urban life was a harsh reality that most Americans had to come to terms with and was a major source of shared cultural anxiety.
Read in this way, how does Poe’s story attempt to capture the new senses of anonymity, strangeness, and random mysteriousness that the urban experience of the modern city created? Did you noticed any thematic similarities between this story and “The Man that Was Used Up,” in terms of how Poe’s fiction often addressed the cultural anxieties that urbanization and industrialization brought to modern society?
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