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.