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ABSTRACT: This essay argues that queer approaches to Poe's work can benefit from a consideration of his poem "The Raven," a work invested in finding connections between a subject's desire and object-choice and his experience of time. The poem is especially relevant to what has been called the "temporal turn" in queer theory over the last decade: it demonstrates how non-normative desire excludes individuals from what Lee Edelman has called "reproductive futurism," the heteronormative prescription that requires individuals to produce future generations through heterosexual pairing, and that casts individuals who do not participate in this behavior as "queer." In the poem's famous repetition of "nevermore," first by the raven and then by the narrator, we can see a growing acknowledgment of the subject's exclusion from "reproductive futurism." And, in its conclusion, "The Raven" gestures toward the potential liberation that this exclusion offers as a temporal orientation to queer individuals-the freedom to invent new and more creative life paths as they deviate from heteronormative norms.
Over the last ten to fifteen years, queer scholarship on Edgar Allan Poe's work by such scholars as Gustavus Stadler, Valerie Rohy, Leland Person, and David Greven has mined his fiction to discover and analyze "manifestations of non-normative desire."1 Works as diverse as "William Wilson," "The Man of the Crowd," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Cask of Amontillado," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, "The Man That Was Used Up," and the Dupin mysteries have, because of the male homosociality at their center, become the commonplaces in such explorations of non-normative desire, as manifested primarily in the form of erotic attraction and sexual activity between men.2 Given this focused interest in the homoerotic in Poe's fiction, it is perhaps not surprising that his most famous poem, "The Raven," a work focused on a late-night encounter between a man and a bird, has not received much attention. This essay proposes that queer scholarship on Poe has missed something significant due to its neglect of the poem, a work invested in finding connections between a subject's desire and object-choice and his experience of time. In this reading, "The Raven" is especially relevant to what has been called the...