Framing effects have a significant influence on the finitely repeated matching pennies game. The combination of being labelled "a guesser", and having the objective of matching the opponent’s action, appears to be advantageous. We find that being a player who aims to match the opponent’s action is advantageous irrespective of whether the player moves first or second. We examine alternative explanations for our results and relate them to Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter". We propose a behavioral model (...) which generates the observed asymmetry in the players’ performance. (shrink)

Explores the science and creative process behind Poe’s cosmological treatise. Silver Winner for Philosophy, 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards In 1848, almost a year and a half before Edgar Allan Poe died at the age of forty, his book Eureka was published. In it, he weaved together his scientific speculations about the universe with his own literary theory, theology, and philosophy of science. Although Poe himself considered it to be his magnum opus, Eureka has mostly (...) been overlooked or underappreciated, sometimes even to the point of being thought an elaborate hoax. Remarkably, however, in Eureka Poe anticipated at least nine major theories and developments in twentieth-century science, including the Big Bang theory, multiverse theory, and the solution to Olbers’ paradox. In this book—the first devoted specifically to Poe’s science side—David N. Stamos, a philosopher of science, combines scientific background with analysis of Poe’s life and work to highlight the creative and scientific achievements of this text. He examines Poe’s literary theory, theology, and intellectual development, and then compares Poe’s understanding of science with that of scientists and philosophers from his own time to the present. Next, Stamos pieces together and clarifies Poe’s theory of scientific imagination, which he then attempts to update and defend by providing numerous case studies of eureka moments in modern science and by seeking insights from comparative biography and psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, and evolution. David N. Stamos teaches philosophy at York University in Toronto. He is the author of several books, including Darwin and the Nature of Species, also published by SUNY Press. (shrink)

Edgar Allan Poe’s standing as a literary figure, who drew on (and sometimes dabbled in) the scientific debates of his time, makes him an intriguing character for any exploration of the historical interrelationship between science, literature and philosophy. His sprawling ‘prose-poem’ Eureka (1848), in particular, has sometimes been scrutinized for anticipations of later scientific developments. By contrast, the present paper argues that it should be understood as a contribution to the raging debates about scientific methodology at the time. (...) This methodological interest, which is echoed in Poe’s ‘tales of ratiocination’, gives rise to a proposed new mode of—broadly abductive—inference, which Poe attributes to the hybrid figure of the ‘poet-mathematician’. Without creative imagination and intuition, Science would necessarily remain incomplete, evenby its own standards. This concern with imaginative (abductive) inference ties in nicely with his coherentism, which grants pride of place to the twin virtues of Simplicity and Consistency, which must constrain imagination lest it degenerate into mere fancy. (shrink)

En su faceta de ensayista Edgar Allan Poe desarrolló interesantes ideas que corresponden al campo de la estética. Sin embargo, estas no han sido muy difundidas, y menos en América Latina, al contrario de su labor poética –mejor conocida–, y de su narrativa en prosa –que suele hacer parte de los programas de enseñanza de la literatura universal–. El presente escrito se propone recuperar algunos de sus planteamientos analizando su ensayo teórico “El propósito de la poesía”, siguiendo el (...) rastro de su crítica a una estética burguesa de masas y a una estética aristocrática tradicionalista. Con su lectura atenta rendimos un homenaje al autor, ahondando en su complejo perfil y siguiendo su exploración de temas tan variados como la crítica, el público, la recepción, la creación poética, la función del arte y la importancia social del poeta. Por último, su opinión sobre algunas figuras destacadas de la poesía mundial de su tiempo nos brinda un panorama muy rico del contexto cultural de la primera mitad del siglo XIX. (shrink)

Este artículo analiza tres cuentos de Edgar Allan Poe (El demonio de la perversidad, El gato negro y El corazón delator). Estos cuentos tienen en común el tema de la perversidad hacia cuya elucidación pretendemos avanzar desde la premisa deleuziana según la cual es preciso volver al espacio literario donde fueron nombradas las perversidades, con el fin de obtener algunas claves de comprensión sobre las causas y consecuencias de la perversidad, así como sobre la naturaleza de estos personajes (...) literarios que, en los tres cuentos citados, se autodefinen como víctimas de esta condición que se encarna en los seres humanos bajo la forma de un demonio. Nos acompañarán en este recorrido los aportes teóricos de Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, François Delaporte y Claude-Olivier Doron. (shrink)

We enter the room of Poe’s midnight reader and witness the uncanny visit of the raven. We begin to notice that the repetition of the word ‘nevermore’ is strange in that it seems to carry within it despair, as well as a promise. And so we listen carefully and begin to read a dissemination of this single word, a word that takes us on an unforgettable journey. But to do so we must disseminate ourselves so that we can remain with (...) our reader while flying with the raven toward the disseminating sounds within the word: ‘evermore’, ‘more’, ‘or’. Our raven guide leads us toward wonders beyond imagination: toward other ravens flying with coded messages, toward an apocalyptic sunrise where we think that we perhaps saw the lost Lenore. But we return to the midnight study, knowing that we will see her ‘nevermore ’.Nous pénétrons le cabinet du lecteur de minuit imaginé par Poe et sommes témoins de I’inquiétante visite du corbeau. Nous sommes frappés par I’étrangeté du mot «nevermore», «plus jamais», qui traîne avec lui désespoir et promesse. Nous prêtons alors une oreille attentive et entreprenons la dissémination de ce mot qui nous conduira à une dissémination de nous-mêmes. Portés par le jeu des sonorités, nous nous envolons vers des mondes fantastiques dans lesquels se retrouvent d’autres corbeaux portant des messages codés, où point une aube apocalyptique où nous croyons avoir perçu Lenore. Mais nous devons retourner au cabinet, sachant que nous ne la reverrons «plus jamais». (shrink)

We enter the room of Poe’s midnight reader and witness the uncanny visit of the raven. We begin to notice that the repetition of the word ‘nevermore’ is strange in that it seems to carry within it despair, as well as a promise. And so we listen carefully and begin to read a dissemination of this single word, a word that takes us on an unforgettable journey. But to do so we must disseminate ourselves so that we can remain with (...) our reader while flying with the raven toward the disseminating sounds within the word: ‘evermore’, ‘more’, ‘or’. Our raven guide leads us toward wonders beyond imagination: toward other ravens flying with coded messages, toward an apocalyptic sunrise where we think that we perhaps saw the lost Lenore. But we return to the midnight study, knowing that we will see her ‘nevermore ’.Nous pénétrons le cabinet du lecteur de minuit imaginé par Poe et sommes témoins de I’inquiétante visite du corbeau. Nous sommes frappés par I’étrangeté du mot «nevermore», «plus jamais», qui traîne avec lui désespoir et promesse. Nous prêtons alors une oreille attentive et entreprenons la dissémination de ce mot qui nous conduira à une dissémination de nous-mêmes. Portés par le jeu des sonorités, nous nous envolons vers des mondes fantastiques dans lesquels se retrouvent d’autres corbeaux portant des messages codés, où point une aube apocalyptique où nous croyons avoir perçu Lenore. Mais nous devons retourner au cabinet, sachant que nous ne la reverrons «plus jamais». (shrink)

In 1956 Jacques Lacan proposed as interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's "Purloined Letter" that at once challenged literary theorists and revealed a radically new conception of psychoanalysis. Lacan's far-reaching claims about language and truth provoked a vigorous critique by Jacques Derrida, whose essay in turn has spawned further responses from Barbara Johnson, Jane Gallop, Irene Harvey, Norman Holland, and others. The Purloined Poe brings Poe's story together with these readings to provide, in the words of the editors, "a (...) structured exercuse in the elaboration of textual interpretation. The Purloined Poe reprints the full text of Poe's story, followed by Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" along with extensive commentary by the editors. Marie Bonaparte's and Shoshana Felman's discussions of traditional and contemporary approaches to "psychoanalysing" texts precede Alan Bass's new translation of Derrida's "Purveyor of Truth." The subsequent essays join the Lacan-Derrida debate and offer alternative readings by literary theorists, philosophers, psychologists, and psychoanalysts. The Purloined Poe convenes much of the most important current scholarship on "The Purloined Letter" and presents a rich sampling of poststructuralist discourse. (shrink)

Edgar Allan Poe’s eerie short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” is a particularly noteworthy example of the sublime, a psychological state in which one is overwhelmed by the magnitude of that which is perceived by the mind. Valdemar exemplifies the sublime in that his death has somehow been suspended in time because he was under hypnosis as part of a medical experiment at the moment of his passing. However, the story also draws particular attention (...) to the means by which insight into the nature of death is acquired by the hypnotist who narrates the story. For a more comprehensive understanding of the sublime experience, one may turn to the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and the postmodernist work of Slavoj Žižek, which lead to the conclusion that the dramatic chain of events in “Valdemar” is an example of the sliding signifier, and, moreover, that the instability of the signifier may explain the sublime effect. (shrink)

To me a painted paroquet Hath been – a most familiar bird– Taught me my alphabet to say– To lisp my very earliest word. Edgar Allan Poe, “Romance,” Poetry and Tales 53 Logographical necessity (ana...

In Between Literature and Science Peter Swirski examines the true intellectual scope of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Popular Culture in the Houses of Poe and CortázarDaniel Bautista (bio)"[…]at the age of nine I read Edgar Allan Poe for the first time. That book I stole to read because my mother didn't want me to read it, she thought I was too young and she was right. The book scared me and I was ill for three months, because I believed in it."…—Julio Cortázar1In interviews (...) and essays, Julio Cortázar, the famous Argentine author, often expressed a lifelong fascination with Edgar Allan Poe (Berg 227–32). Moreover, as a young man Cortázar spent two years translating the American author's prose into Spanish, making irresistible the search for traces of Poe in his own work. His description of Poe as a youthful and guilty pleasure reflects a common reaction to the American author that has led some critics to rue Poe's influence. Jonathan Elmer points out that "Poe's connection with juvenile tastes, and hence with a time when reading and acquiring 'culture' were actually enjoyable […] has been insistently and disapprovingly stressed by the Anglo-American literary-historical tradition" (3). Although Poe himself often liked to "advertise [his work] as ethereal and otherworldly, or avowedly timeless," critics who found elements of the vulgarly popular in his writing regarded the author as a true "stumbling block" in the American literary landscape (Rosenheim and Rachman xii; Eliot 205). In a similar vein, Elmer observes,It has puzzled many critics, sometimes to the point of vituperation, that Poe stands simultaneously as the germinal figure of a central modernist trajectory (leading via Baudelaire to French Symbolism and thence to the high modernism of Eliot and others) and as the much-acknowledged pioneer of several durable mass-cultural genres: detective fiction and science fiction, as well as certain modes of sensational or gothic horror, which are today, to use one of Poe's coinages, "omniprevalent."(2)In the past, such critics tended to dismiss Poe to the fringes of the American canon for what they saw as his highbrow pretensions and lowbrow taste. More recently, critics like Elmer and others have argued that Poe's ability to straddle the high/low cultural divide is precisely what makes him such a perennially fascinating writer and one of the most revealing about American culture in general.Considering Poe's high standing in Latin America, one might assume that the question of his low or popular status was not as much of a stumbling block there.2 Cortázar himself blamed American discomfort with Poe on his use of "baroque" language, an issue that Cortázar's own background as a native Spanish speaker allowed him to ignore: [End Page 1] "since I'm neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn't the slightest importance next to his genius" (Weiss 73). The idea that an author's "genius" could rise above the demands of his countrymen was important to Cortázar. Questions about his own cultural status also significantly affected the reception of Cortázar's work, though in many ways he suffered from just the opposite charges made against Poe. The style and themes of his work, and the political context in Argentina during the early part of his career (characterized most conspicuously by the rise of Perónism), led some in the literary establishment of his own country to accuse Cortázar of being too European or elitist.3 Looking at Poe and Cortázar together, this essay compares how both authors negotiated such cultural issues in their writing and the way that Cortázar reworks some of Poe's particular strategies in a modern Argentine setting. Focusing on two of these authors' most well-known stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher" (published in 1839) and "Casa tomada" ("House Taken Over") (published in 1946), I argue that they both reflect some of the ways that Poe and Cortázar grappled with the rise and attraction of a popular culture that threatened to reconfigure their particular literary landscapes.In Keywords, Raymond Williams traces the... (shrink)

Aping apes: Edgar Allan Poe's "The murders in the Rue Morgue" and Richard Wright's Native son -- Slavery's bestiary: Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales -- Autoimmunity and ante-racism: Philip Roth's The human stain -- Ashamed of shame: J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace.

This paper presents and discusses Simon Evnine’s hylomorphic account of fictional characters and proposes some amendments to it with the aim of explaining the functioning of fictional characters. The paper does so by relying on a case study, viz. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story Berenice. The amended hylomorphic account of fictional characters will also be capable of explaining the malfunctioning of fictional characters.

Cuentos malévolos (1904), libro de Clemente Palma, revela un tópico constante, basado en lo terrorífico, propio del romanticismo. Asimismo, aquella preferencia del autor se le atribuye a su filiación con Édgar Allan Poe, quien construyó discursos caracterizados por la configuración apocalíptica de personajes, situaciones y ambientes que desecadenaban lo irracional y lo paranormal. Desde la publicación del compendio del escritor peruano, la exégesis literaria se ha manifestado a través de reseñas y prólogos. Sin embargo, en un segundo momento, se (...) han realizado artículos y libros que investigan el contenido desarrollado en esta obra. Este procedimiento de recepción de la hermenéutica es lo que prevalezco en este estudio, considerando que el propósito principal es identificar los lineamientos persistentes que plantea la crítica literaria, con la finalidad de instaurar vertientes temáticas que contribuyan a la comprensión del texto y la generación de investigaciones posteriores, distinguidas por su delimitación y su originalidad. (shrink)

I propose a definition of the uncanny: an anxious uncertainty about what is real caused by an apparent impossibility. First, I outline the relevance of the uncanny to art and aesthetics. Second, I disambiguate theoretical uses of ‘uncanny’ and establish the sense of the term that I am interested in—namely, an emotional state directed towards particular objects in the world which are characteristically eerie, creepy, and weird. Third, I look at Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House (...) of Usher’ as a means of drawing out the conditions that I claim are essential to uncanny experiences, and then elaborate the terms of my proposed definition. Finally, I show how the definition accounts for two paradigmatic kinds of uncanny phenomena: cases of ‘uncanny resemblances’, which include twins, doppelgangers, and very lifelike representations of the human body; and unlikely coincidences of events. (shrink)

The association of poetry and femininity … excluded women poets. For the female figures onto whom the men projected their artistic selves—Tennyson’s Mariana and Lady of Shalott, Browning’s Pippa and Balaustion, Arnold’s Iseult of Brittany—represent an intensification of only a part of the poet, not his full consciousness: a part, furthermore, which is defined as separate from and ignorant of the public world and the great range of human experience in society. Such figures could not write their own poems; the (...) male poet, who stands outside the private world of art, has to do that for them. The Lady of Shalott could not imagine someone complex and experienced enough to imagine the world beyond range of her windows, or to imagine her. A woman poet who identified herself with such a stock figure of intense and isolated art would hardly be able to write at all. Or, like the Lady of Shalott preparing her death-ship, she could write only her own name, only herself. For a man, writing poetry meant an apparent withdrawal from the public sphere , but for a woman it meant just the opposite: a move toward public engagement and self-assertion in the masculine world. She could not just reverse the roles in her poetry and create a comparable male self-projection, since the male in this set of opposites is defined as experienced, complexly self-conscious, and part of the public world and therefore could not serve as a figure for the poet. We can formulate the problem like this: a man’s poem which contains a female self-projection shows to distinctly different figures, poet and projection; in a woman’s poem on the same model, the two would blur into one.Furthermore, it’s not really poets that are women, for the Victorians: poems are women. The cliché that style is the man arises more readily and with much greater literalness and force when the stylist is a woman, and it is often charged with erotic intensity. The young lovers in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe describe their perfect love by singing that he is the sculptor and she the clay, he the singer and she the song. Ladislaw in Middlemarch tells Dorothea that she needn’t write poems because she is a poem. Edgar Allan Poe remarks in a review of Barrett Browning’s works that “a woman and her book are identical.” In her love letters Barrett Browning herself worried about the problem of her identity—was she her poems, were they she, which was Browning in love with? “I love your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett,” he had written disconcertingly in his first letter, “… and I love you too.” […] As we can see in Tennyson’s The Princess, the lyric in particular seemed female to Victorians—private, nonlogical, purely emotional—and it is surely no accident that large numbers of English and American women began to publish poetry in the nineteenth century, when the lyric established its dominance. Victorian poems like Victorian women were expected to be morally and spiritually uplifting, to stay mostly in the private sphere, and to provide emotional stimulus and release for overtasked men of affairs.9 All this may have encouraged women to write poetry, but at the same time it made writing peculiarly difficult because it reinforced the aspects of conventional Victorian femininity—narcissism, passivity, submission, silence—most inimical to creative activity. Since women already are the objects they try to create, why should they write? 9. John Woolford points this out in “EBB: Woman and Poet,” Browning Society Notes 9 : 4. Dorothy Mermin is professor and chairman in the department of English at Cornell University. She is the author of The Audience in the Poem and is currently working on a critical study of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. (shrink)

Wreathed in myrtle, my sword I'll conceal Like those champions devoted and brave, When they plunged in the tyrant their steel And to Athens deliverance gave. (Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Hymn to Harmodius an...

What makes someone an evil person? How are evil people different from merely bad people? Do evil people really exist? Can we make sense of evil people if we mythologize them? Do evil people take pleasure in the suffering of others? Can evil people be redeemed? Peter Brian Barry answers these questions by examining a wide range of works from renowned authors, including works of literature by Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Oscar Wilde (...) alongside classic works of philosophy by Nietzsche and Aristotle. By considering great texts from literature and philosophy, Barry examines whether evil is merely a fiction. _The Fiction of Evil_ explores how the study of literature can contribute to the study of metaphysics and ethics and it is essential reading for those studying the concept of evil or philosophy of literature at undergraduate level. (shrink)

This paper scrutinizes the topic of meaning manifestation and signification made known by the act of interpretation, which amounts to finding the organising principles of a text and rules of combination. The language of narrativity is a set of generational and transformational instances disguising textual content and initiating interpretation as such. The paper discusses the levels of description which assist in tackling the concept of change, or difference in degrees, as the result of both the artificial operation of rewriting the (...) text on various methodological grounds and real dynamics justified by the obvious layers of the plot. The elementary units of meaning articulation covered by this article run the gamut from Roland Barthes’ distributional and integrational narrative units to Algirdas Julien Greimas’ deep and surface structures with special stress on the narrative programs and narrative analysis, which is of primary interest here. The Greimassian narrative grammar successfully describes what exists and how to capture the process of signification. In the end, analytical instruments elaborated by Greimas are effectively adapted to interpret the case of Edgar Allan Poe’s story William Wilson. The story itself is retold and interpreted through narrative formalisation, which consists in speaking of the plot transformations in terms of utterances of states and utterances of doing. Within the framework of narrative structures that emerge on the way to the formalisation of William Wilson, small changes in narrative trajectories seem to be out of sight, not even readable. Contrariwise, Barthes’ touch on what the text is all about enables the reader to be engaged in looser textual interpretations, to gain more variable, highly detailed experience in noticing the slightest movement and tasting each nuance of the overall setting. This paper first and foremost takes on board the structural narrative analysis as it is set out in Greimas’ narrative grammar leading to a special kind of severe narrative absolutism; on top of that, the paper gives a clue of a couple of alternative views on the problem, views represented by Barthes. (shrink)

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered (...) human and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history. (shrink)

In The Colorful Conservative, R.O.P. Lopez culls important insights into American culture from the works of Phillis Wheatley, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry David Thoreau, William Wells Brown, and Walt Whitman. Lopez contends that many of the tensions that emerged prior to the Civil War remain unresolved; thus, the nineteenth century never ended and Americans still live in the literary framework of the 1800s. Beyond political distinctions of the left and the right, there are really four poles: The Left, (...) The Conformist Burkeans, The Anarchist-Nihilist-Libertarians, and The Colorful Conservatives. The Left and the Colorful Conservatives are the two poles most at odds with each other. The Colorful Conservatives, Lopez argues, encompass these five American authors and are the driving force behind many unique paradoxes in the United States' political culture"--Back cover. (shrink)

In this paper I propose that, since the mid-eighteenth century medical science has simultaneously generated and disavowed ‘undead’ bodies, suspended between life and death. Through close analysis of three examples of ‘undeath’ taken from different moments in medical history, I consider what these bodies can tell us about medicine, its history, cultural meaning, scientific status and its role in shaping ideas of embodiment, identity and death. My first example is Edgar Allan Poe’s story ‘The facts in the case (...) of M. Valdemar’ which imagines the possibility of a man mesmerised at the point of death. I read this story as a response to the rise of professional, scientific medicine in the 1840s. I then look at the recurring issue of brain death in order to consider tensions within twentieth-century medical hegemony. Finally I read the Alder Hey scandal as a reactivation of undead anxiety in response to the emergent culture of medical consumerism at the end of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Before 1800 nothing was irrelevant. So argues Elisa Tamarkin's sweeping cultural history of a key shift in consciousness: the arrival, around 1800, of "relevance" as the means to grasp how something previously disregarded becomes important and interesting. At a time when so much makes claims to attention every day, how does one decide what is most valuable right now? This is not only a contemporary problem. For Ralph Waldo Emerson, the question for the nineteenth century was how, in the immensity (...) and "succession" of objects, anything becomes a proper object of experience. How that question was finally defined as one of relevance is the story of Apropos of Nothing. Relevance, Tamarkin shows, was primarily an Anglo-American concept. It engaged major intellectual figures, centrally the pragmatists-William James, Alain Locke, and John Dewey-and before them thinkers including Emerson and Alfred North Whitehead. Most of all, relevance was a problem for the worlds of art, literature, education, and criticism. These were fascinated by how old, boring, distant, or unfamiliar things get taken in; how they are admitted as meaningful; how they come home to us like the ludicrous raven comes to Edgar Allan Poe's student in the middle of the night in some obscure connection with himself. Many nineteenth-century American artists saw their paintings as pragmatic works that make relevance-that suggest versions of events that feel apropos of our world the moment we see them. (Tamarkin's book is richly illustrated, in color, with works by Winslow Homer, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Edgar Degas, and others.) Relevance remains a conundrum, especially for the humanities. It obliges us to say why we admit Poe's poem-or, say, a line of Emerson's-is interesting enough to study it, to dedicate ourselves to understanding it, to affirming that this effort is, in Emerson's words, "relevant to me and mine, to nature, and the hour that now passes.". (shrink)

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a wide variety of American writers proposed the existence of energies connecting human beings to cosmic processes. From varying points of view--scientific, philosophical, religious, and literary--they suggested that such energies would eventually result in the perfection of individual and collective bodies, assuming that assimilation into larger networks of being meant the expansion of humanity's powers and potentialities--a belief that continues to inform much posthumanist theory today. Universes without Us explores a lesser-known countertradition in (...) American literature. As Matthew A. Taylor's incisive readings reveal, the heterodox cosmologies of Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Adams, Charles Chesnutt, and Zora Neale Hurston reject the anthropocentric fantasy that sees the universe as a kind of reservoir of self-realization. For these authors, the world can be made neither "other" nor "mirror." Instead, humans are enmeshed with "alien" processes that are both constitutive and destructive of "us." By envisioning universes no longer our own, these cosmologies picture a form of interconnectedness that denies any human ability to master it. Universes without Us demonstrates how the questions, possibilities, and dangers raised by the posthuman appeared nearly two centuries ago. Taylor finds in these works an untimely engagement with posthumanism, particularly in their imagining of universes in which humans are only one category of heterogeneous thing in a vast array of species, objects, and forces. He shows how posthumanist theory can illuminate American literary texts and how those texts might, in turn, prompt a reassessment of posthumanist theory. By understanding the posthuman as a materialist cosmology rather than a technological innovation, Taylor extends the range of thinkers who can be included in contemporary conversations about the posthuman. (shrink)

One measure of the validity of [Joseph] Frank's insight is the extent to which other versions of his ideas appear in other contexts: for if "spatial form" refers to something real, it cannot have escaped notice by other readers. One thinks, for example, of Northrop Frye's description of the critic viewing all the elements of the poem as a simultaneous array before him; or of Gaston Bachelard's evocative descriptions of The Poetics of Space. Or Pound's interest in ideographic script; or (...) the frequent critical association of modern literature with impressionist painting. Or Eliot's poet synthesizing Spinoza, the sound of the typewriter, and the smell of cookery into a unified whole. Or—at the root of it all, perhaps—Poe's insistence on the unified effect of the story or poem.1 All of these instances reflect a more or less casual assumption of the basic premise of Frank's essay. More recently another critic, Frank Kermode, has offered an alternative description of this general problem. In The Romantic Image2 he assesses symbolist poetic theory; here the verbal image , autonomous and autotelic, presumably unites meaning and feeling without intervening reflection or discourse: the "image" so hypostatized seems very close to a "spatial" form, and certainly the suppression of discourse, of reflection generally, follows from the disruption of syntax and narrative that results from the impulse toward "spatial" effects. Provisionally, we might say that Joseph Frank's essay is grounded in an essentially formalist conception of the literary work as artifact, and that the striking features of his argument result from an attempt to assimilate extended works to a theory basically lyric in its orientation: as corollary, we must assume that the modern writers he cites had themselves operationally defined the concept in the course of their writing. · 1. Northrop Frye, "Literary Criticism," in The Aims and Methods of Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. James Thorpe , p.65. See also Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology , p. 21. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas . Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound . T.S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Essays , p. 247. Edgar Allan Poe, review of Twice-Told Tales, in Works, 17 vols., ed. James A. Harrison 11: 104-13.· 2. Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image . William Holtz, professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, is currently preparing an edition of an unpublished juvenile manuscript by Charlotte Brontë. (shrink)

In Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Hsuan L. Hsu examines how literature represents different kinds of spaces ranging from the single-family home to the globe. He focuses on authors such as Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Sarah Orne Jewett, who drew on literary tools such as rhetoric, setting, and point of view to mediate between individuals and different kinds of spaces. These authors used forms such as the regional sketch, (...) the domestic novel, and the detective story to re-examine how local spaces and communities would change when incorporated into global economic and political networks. Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature is valuable reading for American literature scholars, and for all concerned with intersections between literature and geography"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Applying ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory, this book historicizes psychoanalysis through a new and significant theorization of the Gothic. The central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram Stoker.

In this article the author explores Jacques Derrida’s reading in The Purveyor of Truth of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter. In his essay, Derrida proposes a reading which differs markedly from the interpretation proposed by Lacan in his Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’. To appreciate Derrida’s reading, which is not hermeneutic-semantic in nature like that of Lacan, it is necessary to look at the relation of Derrida’s essay to his other texts on psychoanalysis, more specifically insofar as (...) the Freudian death drive is concerned. The present article explores this ‘notion’ as elaborated on by Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle as well as Derrida’s reading of this text. It also investigates the importance of the ‘notion’ of the death drive as well as the significance of Derrida’s reading of The Purloined Letter for constitutional interpretation. (shrink)

The author gets human creativity to bridge phenomenology and metaphysics. He examines closely the poetical principle of Edgar Allan Poe and considers the artwork as a phenomenon appealing to the metaphysical beauty. He also considers the problem of free-dom in phenomenological and metaphysical aspects of creativity. To harmonize the freedom and phenomenology the author offers to differentiate two kinds of intentionality: “intentionality to” and “intentionality from”. The first is reducible to the purposefulness of events and refers to the (...) constitutive function of consciousness, the latter implies the human creativity and freedom as an act of differentiation of phenomenon from its previous limits. The incipient point of the second form of intentionality seems to be a metaphysical object, which is worth considering as an inexhaustible source of the world of phenomena.El autor considera la creatividad humana pare tender un puente entre fenomenología y metafísica. Examina de cerca el principio poético de Edgar Allan Poe y considera la obra de arte como un fenómeno que apela a la belleza metafísica. Considera el problema de la libertad en relación a los aspectos fenomenológicos y metafísicos de la creatividad. Para armonizar la libertad y la fenomenología, el autor propone diferenciar dos tipos de intencionalidad: “intencionalidad a” y “intencionalidad de ”. La primera es reducible a la intencionalidad de los hechos y se refiere a la función constitutiva de la conciencia; la segunda implica la creatividad humana y la libertad como un acto de diferenciación del fenómeno de sus límites anteriores. El punto de partida de la segunda forma de intencionalidad parece ser un objeto metafísico, el cual merece la pena considerar como una inagotable fuente del mundo de los fenómenos. (shrink)

Volume 21 of _The Annual of Psychoanalysis_ is especially welcome for bringing to English-language readers timely contributions from abroad in an opening section on "Psychoanalysis in Europe." The section begins with a translation of Helmut Thomae's substantial critique of the current state of psychoanalytic education; Thomae's proposal for comprehensive reform revolves around a redefinition of the status of the training analysis in analytic training. Diane L'Heureux-Le Beuf's clinical diary of an analysis focusing on the narcissistic elements of oedipal conflict probes (...) the degree to which the analytic method can be applied to "nonstructured" analysands. And Nella Guidi shows the clinical value of supplementing Freud's notion of unobjectionable positive transference with the complementary notion of unobjectionable negative transference. Section II, on "Psychoanalysis and Hysteria," offers original contributions to Freud scholarship in the form of Jules Glenn's reconsideration of Dora's "Dynamics, Diagnosis, and Treatment"; William McGrath's analysis of the way Freud's hostility to religious superstition gained expression in his early work on hysteria; and Marian Tolpin's self-psychological reprise on the case of Anne O. The section concludes with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Sarah Cummin's provocative "What Happened to 'Anorexie Hysterique'?" which questions the contemporary separation of anorexia from hysteria and explore the sociohistorical reasons the separation came about. Section III, "Clinical and Theoretical Studies," begins with Nancy Kobrin's discussion of Freud's ideas about autonomy, including the terms Freud used and the way Strachey translated them into English. Her goal is to deepen our understanding of how Freud spoke and thought about an individual's sense of self. Frank Summers shows how object relations principles, which are shared by various object relations theories, can inform the conduct of analysis at all levels of pathology, including neurosis. And Henry Smith examines the meaning and value of the "analytic surface," a metaphor that highlights the relationship between the analyst's attention and the patient's attention. A final section on "Applied Psychoanalysis" offers contemporary examples of applied analytic inquiry in anthropology, art, and literature. Roy Grinker, III and Roy Grinker, Jr., in a methodological contribution to psychoanalytic anthropology, examine what is revealed when a native people are asked to retell a story introduced by them by their Western observers. Danielle Knafo explores the art and life of the Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo through the concepts of the mirror, the mask, and the masquerade. And David Werman closes the volume with a comparative study of Edgar Allan Poe's and James Ensor's obsession with revenge, and the role it played in Poe's writing and Ensor's etchings, respectively. Bringing readers the influential reform proposals of Thomae, a rich sampling of recent Freud scholarship, applied contributions traversing three disciplines, and original clinical contributions reflecting American and European sensibilities, Volume 21 of _The Annual_ is true to the spirit of this distinguished series. It testifies to the scope of analytic inquiry, and it exemplifies the yield of such inquiry in the hands of gifted scholars and clinicians. (shrink)

The invention of computer simulations used for practicing surgical maneuvers in a video game-like format has an ancestry in the artificial limbs of history and is reflected, grotesquely, in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, “The Man That Was Used Up” (1850). The nineteenth century worked to ensure that the incomplete body did indeed retain a sense of self by creating prostheses to mimic corporeal wholeness. Our present-day technology seems intent on doing precisely the opposite, deliberately fragmenting the body (...) and challenging our understanding of the body and the prosthetic. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I argue that early nineteenth-century American poets’ and readers’ interpretations of Romanticism shaped their understanding of the role poetry and its producers could play in a developing national culture. By examining the public careers and private sentiments of four male poets — William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jones Very — I analyze how each reconciled poetic vocation with the moral and economic obligations associated with the attainment of manhood. I locate (...) these poets and their critics within specific historical discourses of aesthetic reception and production, focusing on the tensions and overlaps between Scottish Common-sense and Romantic aesthetic thought. Finally, I suggest that as a career objective the production of poetry paralleled rather than opposed the middle-class project of the “self-made man.” The effortful self-mastery urged upon young men by prescriptive writers was echoed in critics’ assessments of American poets’ works. Both the male poet and the self-made man operated within discourses which stressed imperatives — do, be, act — without specific objects. Yet, for aspiring poets, Romantic emphases on spontaneous composition and emotional expressiveness made deliberate craftsmanship irrelevant to poetic production. By identifying poetic production as spontaneous and as the highest form of disinterested intellectual labor, antebellum American critics and poets alike obscured the actual work involved in poetry writing. This erasure of conscious literary labor separated effort from its products, replacing a poet’s personal motives for writing poetry with the more nebulous goal of service, to be achieved through evidently inspired transcription than through purposeful composition. The title ‘poet’ suggested devotion to higher, more abstract goals, above mere commodity production. Each of these poets’ careers show how ambition compelled aspiring American poets to justify their work while disclaiming their individual hopes for their poetry and their reputations. Each poet promoted an understanding of poetic labor that demanded just such disclaimers. By underscoring the insubstantial and all but effortless nature of poetic composition itself, all four of these poets contributed to an enfeebled definition of the male poet — as a man who received impressions rather than produced them, and who observed rather than acted. (shrink)