Henri Justin Named Honorary Member of the Poe Studies Association

Abstract

Professor Henri Justin is a scholar and translator whose lifelong devotion to Poe and the furthering of his studies should be praised for having always countered any exclusionary outlook in terms of investigative discipline, genre, or nativity.Professor Justin's doctoral dissertation, Poe dans le champ du vertige (Poe in the field of vertigo; Éditions Klincksieck, 1991), situates Poe as a pivotal figure in the turn from romanticism to structuralism. This work is telling of Justin's commitment to an international approach to Poe and to bringing non-English literary theory, linguistics, and psychoanalysis into his own insights of textual elaboration around imaginary geometries and absent figures in Poe's short stories and the “cosmosis” of Eureka. In Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose (With Poe until the end of prose; Éditions Galllimard, 2009), Justin continued to give his overview of Poe's prose, this time with the thesis of the “fault line”—how Poe worked in that fine edge and abyss between the two sides of several dualities, such as hallucinatory vision and analytical rationality, closure and dispersal, or narrator and writer. In 2012, Justin devoted the concise volume Edgar Allan Poe, poète malgré tout (Edgar Allan Poe, poet despite everything) to Poe's love of the poem per se, above and beyond all morality or duty toward reality. He has been working in recent years on a volume on Poe and Shakespeare—against a background of having taught U.S. and English literature of all periods and levels at several locations (Paris III, York University, Université d'Orléans)—along with several essays in which he continues to explore facets of Poe that have made him a sterling scholar, assuring the robustness and afterlife of Poe in France and elsewhere in the twenty-first century. This endeavor had its landmark right at the cusp of the millennium with the organization of the impeccable dossier Poe for the prestigious journal Europe in 2000.Additionally, Henri Justin has consecrated the last decade of his career to the retranslation of Poe's short stories, daring to offer alternative readings to Baudelaire's Poe translations, following a rationale he himself set out in his “Retranslating Poe into French” in the collective volume of essays Translated Poe (Lehigh University Press, 2014). Those of us who have worked with him on the latter and other endeavors have remained impressed with his unflinching professionalism and tender passion for the beauty of creative and well-researched ideas. As for his passion for Poe, he speaks well for himself in these remarkable lines from the conclusion of Avec Poe jusqu'au bout de la prose (my translation): “I maintain an insane admiration, an ever-renewed amazement for Poe's texts. One always feels there the stretched cable of the tightrope walker, the razor's edge, the letter's fold, that which retains no inscription but in whose proximity all signification enters the field of the attraction/repulsion of its opposite, drafting promises of senses…. If Poe continues to be read, and by all publics, it is because each reader perceives, more or less confusingly, that such folds of the text verge on an ultimate secret.” For his relentless advocacy of Poe and for his mentorship of a new generation of scholars and readers of Poe, we recognize Professor Justin with honorary membership in the Poe Studies Association.