Poe's Fluid, Terraqueous Landscapes: An Archipelagic Rereading of "The Journal of Julius Rodman"

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In this article, I reread Edgar Allan Poe's "The Journal of Julius Rodman" in an archipelagic mode (Roberts and Stephens). The novel reimagines and remaps American space as a "fluid" and island-studded landscape (Dimock) of shifting identities, blurring timelines, and uncertain boundaries. An archipelagic rereading of "Rodman" extends backwards in time the critical purchase of Roberts and Stephens's ideas to the moment when the continental identity of the United States solidified. But the significance of this rereading goes beyond bringing new materials into—and consequently expanding the interpretive range of—the terraqueous perspective of archipelagic American studies. "Rodman" forms part of a hemispheric archive that must be read archipelagically and continentally. Poe's novel applies this continental-insular doubling dissolutionally and dis-illusionally to the nineteenth-century expansionism of the United States. "Rodman" calls attention to the land- and seascapes (the Glissantian paysages ) of the Americas. Poe narrates American history in "Rodman" as a fluid and terraqueous landscape of coursing rivers that interconnect continents and seas. I conclude the piece by reflecting on the symbolic importance of rivers within the archipelagic Americas.