Abstract

While the status of the "quality" of the work of Edgar Allen Poe will probably remain forever controversial, he remains a singularly important figure in American Letters. Using Walter Benjamin's ideas of allegory, this dissertation attempts to interrogate and explore exactly what it is in the fiction of Poe that resists critical interpretation and totalization. ;The first chapter articulates the development of Walter Benjamin's ideas of allegorical criticism. This criticism depends on the destruction of the outward, semiotic communicative aspect of language, and attempts to illuminate and liberate the elements of non-communicative language, what Benjamin calls "pure language," from the surrounding material text. ;The second chapter explores techniques of creating pure language in a work , ambiguity and ambivalence created in the reader by this pure language , and one possible method of liberating this pure language . ;The third chapter is a reading of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym along with the Freudian Marie Bonaparte, and it demonstrates how difference, which helps create and define the novel, works to make the search for any stable origin, especially a psychological origin, impossible. This chapter also shows how in Benjamin's allegorical system, no one type of text can be privileged over any other type. ;The fourth chapter is a discussion of "The Purloined Letter," along with Lacan's "Seminar" and Derrida's reading of Lacan. This chapter attempts to show how the relationship between truth and fiction is extremely unstable and problematic. Instead of trying to find the truth of a work of fiction, this chapter suggests that a more fruitful approach to literature might be indifferent to truth, might itself be fictional. ;The final chapter is a reading of Blanchot's Death Sentence with Poe's "Ligeia," "Berenice," "Morella" and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." This chapter argues that both Blanchot and Poe consciously and explicitly interrogate the relationship between death and writing. This chapter argues that it is this obsession with the relationship between death and writing that may explain the importance of Poe's work today and in the tradition