Edgar Allan Poe, King of Memes: An Award Winning Research Paper

Edgar Allan Poe is many things: master of horror, father of the short story, a morose, brooding genius. But who would have ever thought he would also earn the title "King of Memes"?

As a senior in undergrad, I enrolled in a single author course on Edgar Allan Poe. We read very nearly his entire repertoire. But because of the course's busy schedule, some topics we had intended to cover needed to be cut. Unfortunately, "Poe in Pop Culture" was sacrificed (for the noble cause of extending our psychoanalytic discussions of "The Purloined Letter") much to my dismay.

Since starting college, I have become increasingly fascinated with the relationship between popular culture and canonical, "high brow" art (ask me about my critical analysis of Peter Jackson's King Kong). What better way to indulge this fascination than to explore one of America's most well-known authors and the ways in which his stories are used time and time again.

Since starting college, I have become increasingly fascinated with the relationship between popular culture and canonical, "high brow" art.

My nonspecific Google searches of "Poe in pop culture" were helping very little; it was an overflow of information that resulted in a jumbled mess of notes with no clear direction. It was a childhood memory that ended up narrowing my topic and inspiring my paper.

When I was a child, I loved [still love] Toby Keith, the country music superstar who advocates for the nation's armed forces and red plastic cups. His music video for "It's a Little Too Late" was one which provoked both fascination and anxiety in my twelve year-old brain: Toby slowly constructs a brick wall in his garage which will entomb his (cheating?) wife forever. In an ironic twist, the video ends as Toby realizes he has failed to blockade his wife and has sealed his own passageway as a kind of comical karma. Well doesn't that plot sound familiar?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOd2NuHgwew

I revisited the Google search engine with a narrowed topic: "'Amontillado' in pop culture". One of the first results was a Vox article: "Edgar Allan Poe is uniting all your 2016 social phobias in one surprisingly durable meme". As it turned out, Poe's short story, "The Cask of Amontillado", had inspired an entire online community who responded in their common vernacular: sarcastic memes. And it all began with this post:

The Original "Amontillado" Meme

Of course you must have an understanding of the story's plot for this to make sense. I found it (still do) hilarious. The internet is full of such content all inspired by Poe's tale and it doesn't stop at memes. "Amontillado" can be found in every aspect of popular culture from (legendary) albums like Mariana's Trench's "Phantoms" to episodes of "Thomas & Friends".

What I found incredibly interesting about the memes was how users were creating socially relevant, current-events-inspired images that adopted the story's characters and plot. For example, goofpunk posted, "*promises to build a wall for donald trump but only if he drinks some wine in this old cellar*". This tumblr post is just one example of how content creators were using an old (some daresay antiquated) text to talk about a very real issue that was causing widespread anxiety. Tumblr users used the meme structure to also comment on the "murderous clown epidemic" of 2016.

In my final paper, I argue that these memes - seemingly brainless content - should be considered valid cultural artifacts by the academics or canon or whatever powers-that-be who determine what is "good" and "bad" literature because it is the new wave, the new medium, of critical analysis. Because are these content creators not taking a text, identifying underlying meaning, and then applying new meaning and relevancy just as your traditional Marxist read may do? If that's not higher order thinking, I don't know what is. Furthermore, I argue that such technological methods of expression and analysis should be encouraged and integrated into curriculum structures because the world is only going to continue to digitize.

Winner of the 2019 James A. King Writing Award

In April of 2019 - and much to my surprise if we're being quite honest - my research paper won the James A. King Writing Award for its innovative concept and detailed research. If you would like to talk shop (I will talk your ear off about Poe, be warned) shoot me an email. I leave you with one last meme: