Power and Intellect: Exploring the Major Themes of "The Purloined Letter" (original) (raw)
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The 'Seminar on "The Purloined Letter"'
Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From ‘Overture' to ‘Variations on the Standard Treatment', 2024
Abstract of Chapter 2 in Lacan's Écrits: A reader's guide - Volume 1: From 'Seminar on “The Purloined Letter"' to On the Subject Who is Finally in Question (Callum Neill (Editor), Derek Hook (Editor), Stijn Vanheule (Editor)): The ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ appeared at the beginning of the Écrits; Lacan thought the seminar adumbrated important and lasting insights, e.g. repetition compulsion as determined by the Symbolic Order and the letter as “pure signifier,” the referent of which depends upon the subject’s place in a chain of signifiers. Using Edgar Alan Poe’s "The Purloined Letter", Lacan shows Poe’s use of a subjective logic to drive its narrative. It is not a typical detective story. Its style and interesting narrative echo psychoanalytic ideas on repetition, the act of enunciation, and powers of the letter as pure signifier. The chapter explicates Lacan’s views on the logic of speech, which contains a writing that can be deciphered within speaking and shows the stakes of the intersubjective circuit. This writing, found in the deductive method of Poe’s Detective Dupin, leads to cybernetics and probability theory. Using formulations from these fields, Lacan shows the autonomous functioning of the Symbolic. The final section is devoted to this explication and intimates the importance of topology and mathemes in the ‘later’ Lacan. In Poe’s tale, Dupin’s facsimile of purloined letter reveals a compact of jouissance, returning the text to repetition and the death drive.
Crime and its Motives in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Black Cat
2020
Although American Writer Edgar Allan Poe is mainly popular for his tales of mystery and the macabre, he also contributed to the genre of crime fiction in a most impressive way. In particular his 1841 short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is widely regarded as the very “first modern detective story” (cf. Silverman 171, or Meyers 123). According to Grimstad, “a remarkable number of the genre’s defining features were already in place” (83). Poe’s story clearly meets the requirements of the traditional detective story, which e.g. the Encyclopaedia Britannica defines as a “type of popular literature in which a crime is introduced and investigated and the culprit is revealed” (“Detective Story”). However, Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Black Cat, published for the first time in the Saturday Evening Post in 1843, does not belong to the genre of detective fiction. It simply lacks a detective who is investigating a case. Moreover, the identity of “the culprit is [not] revealed” at the end (ibid), but is in fact perfectly known to the reader from the very beginning. Since there are both murder(s), murderer, and victim(s), The Black Cat, nonetheless, falls into the general category of crime fiction. The many literary critics who have examined and analyzed the text, have focused on completely different aspects though, arriving at results which are often quite incompatible with each other. Stephen Rachman credits The Black Cat as having something to do with Poe’s supposed alcoholism (“Poe’s Drinking, Poe’s Delirium: The Privacy of Imps”), whereas Sean J. Kelly examines the way masturbation, or onanism, was dealt with1 (“I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity”). John H. McElroy sees The Black Cat as an example of Poe’s sense of humour (“The Kindred Artist; or, the Case of The Black Cat”), Susan Amper questions Poe’s reliability and seriousness as an author (“Untold Story: The Lying Narrator in The Black Cat”). Last to mention here, Kousik Adhikari investigates the role played by psychology in Poe’s short stories (“Psychology in Crime and Confession: A Critical Study into Poe’s Short Stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat”). These are only a few examples, many other aspects dealt with by other authors could easily be added. Though the findings of all the papers mentioned are undoubtedly valuable in many ways, few authors interpreted The Black Cat as a crime story. By analyzing and reading The Black Cat as crime fiction then, this paper attempts to take a fresh and independent look at the text. More specifically, through literary analysis, its author will pay particular attention to the way Poe makes the narrator of The Black Cat render his confession, as well as present and examine his crime(s) and motive(s). Other aspects of Poe’s tale are not analyzed, since that would clearly exceed the scope of this paper. Its principal purpose remains to look at the nature of the narrator’s crimes and his motive(s) for committing them.
2019
This given research paper presents an analysis of Poe's and our cotemporaries' perception of the great American author's works. “Disease, madness, death, hideous murders… It is only natural that the sanity of the author should become suspect, and that he should appear to be a psychopath describing […] his personal instabilities and abnormalities,” remarks Vincent Buranelli in his 1961 critical study entitled after the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe.
The Imp Of The Revenge - Analysing Vengeance in Poe’s Work
Edgar Allan Poe was in many ways the most versatile 19th century author to analyze the human mind and heart unabashedly, in order to obtain a complex portrait of Man. Vengeance often shows up in Poe’s work: whether it’s a character’s sentence within a non-violent and non-vengeful context or an entire tale totally based on someone’s retribution, the author’s bibliography is full of peculiar cases that deserve to be closely analyzed. Poe is actually one of the few writers able to mould a complex theme such as vengeance adapting it to his creativity and giving birth to different kinds of ‘punishments’, far from each other but all leading to one basic theme, the main subject of this thesis.