Academic literature on the topic 'Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849) – ˜The œpurloined letter'

This paper delves into the long-debated tensions that critics have found in Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)’s writings, which have placed him as a liminal figure between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In particular, I will maintain that these tensions are representative of the contradictions inherent in the modern project, which I will argue are present in Poe’s writings and which situate Poe’s texts as both a symptom of and a reaction to the pathologies of modernity. To this end, I will consider Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), arguing that the problems addressed in the volume were foreshadowed by Poe’s writings a century earlier. After a brief introduction, I will analyse the widely-discussed “The Purloined Letter” (1844) and the attitudes towards rationality that Poe presents in the story. I will then explore the lesser-known “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841),2 where Poe anticipates some of the problems that Horkheimer and Adorno voiced, most notably the confusion between progress and technification.

Dans la première partie, théorique, c'est le processus de la découverte chez Freud qui est étudie: découverte, résistance, travail analytique, découverte, et ainsi de suite. Les trois autres parties (sur The Great Gatsby de Fitzgerald, The purloined letter de Poe et As I lay dying de Faulkner), au moyen de l'analyse des signifiants, j'essaie de découvrir le fantasme central, le désir. On peut voir que, dans ces écrits, le fantasme de symbiose est dissimule par le fantasme oedipien
In the first, and theoretical part, the processes of the freudian discovery are carefully analysed: discovery, resistance, analytical work, discovery, and so on. In the three other parts (about The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, The purloined letter by Poe and As I lay dying by Faulkner), by means of the analysis of the most important words and situations, i try to find out the main fantasy, the desire. We can see that the fantasy of symbiosis is hidden by the oedipian fantasy