Poe's "Berenice" and the Aesthetic of the Interesting

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Poe's critical work—in book reviews, biographies, and more—demonstrates an ongoing fascination with the aesthetic category of "the interesting." Indeed, his literary criticism offers the beginnings of a theory of readerly interest. This essay, however, argues that the fullest articulation of Poe's thinking about interest emerges in "Berenice." In this story, Poe engages the post-Kantian aesthetic theories of Friedrich Schlegel in order to carefully distinguish the experience of the interesting from that of the beautiful. More particularly, the narrator's disease, his "nervous intensity of interest ," signals an exaggerated form of aesthetic interest, a kind of hyperbolic version of readerly absorption. By closely attending to this experience, Poe is able to anatomize the dynamics of aesthetic interest, highlighting the ways in which it moves between feeling and thought. That is, he demonstrates how the interesting begins as a peculiar affective response—a desire to know more or to better understand—but then transforms into a cognitive process of interpretation. He imagines this movement as recursive in nature, with feelings generating thoughts that then invite a return to the feelings themselves. In this way, Poe's work sheds light on both nineteenth- and twenty-first-century aesthetic debates about the form and function of the interesting.