Poe's Story Research Articles

Analysis of the Translation Methods of Edgar Allan Poe's Short Story 'The Tell-Tale Heart' Based on Newmark's Theory

This research analyses the translation methods used by Harum Wibowo in translating Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" based on Peter Newmark's translation theory. This research identifies and assesses the translation methods utilized and examines their alignment with Newmark's theory, including eight translation methods: word-for-word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, communicative translation, semantic translation, adaptation, and free translation. The research employs a descriptive qualitative method with content analysis techniques. The findings indicate that the translator tends to use communicative translation methods to maintain the horror nuances and Poe's distinctive language style. Additionally, some parts of the text show the use of modulation and transposition procedure to align with the target culture's context. This research is anticipated to enhance the understanding of the application of Newmark's theory in literary translation and assist translators in selecting appropriate methods to preserve the meaning and emotional impact of translated texts.

Plot Analysis of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”

This research is a plot analysis of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Poe. This research purpose is to analyze the types of plots and analyze the plot structure in "The Tell-Tale Heart" short story. Research data is extracted from Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart". The method used in data collection is the qualitative method. This study also used theories proposed by Kenney. "The Tell-Tale Heart" is taken because the event in the story begins with the event in the present time, to the next event which is a flashback that supports the first event. Then, proceed back again from the flash-back to the present time. The plot structure has some parts, namely: 1. beginning, 2. middle, 3. end. The beginning of a story is an initial stage that shows the characters in the story, the setting of time and places as well as what the story is about. The middle part contains conflict, complications, and climax.

Hans Pfaall's Breath: Edgar Allan Poe and Antebellum Atmospheres

ABSTRACT: This essay examines the connections between Edgar Allan Poe's "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" and the scientific and political discourse of antebellum America, particularly insofar as it centered on atmospheric science. This essay argues that Poe's story should be read within an antebellum comprehension of atmospheric science that used the atmosphere as a metaphor to comment on freedom, revolution, and slavery. I read Hans's journey through the atmosphere as a thought experiment addressing the contemporary scientific challenge of measuring the upper atmosphere, while also engaging with the era's scientific literature, notably the work of the French astronomer Benjamin Valz. Furthermore, the essay examines the story's engagement with racial determinism and its commentary on human liberty. I suggest that Hans's interaction with the atmosphere both figuratively and literally reflects upon contemporaneous ruminations about race and bondage. By placing "Hans Pfaall" amidst the scientific discourse on atmospheric and astronomical sciences and examining its political and intellectual underpinnings, the essay contributes to the understanding of Poe's work within the broader context of nineteenth-century science and its metaphorical use in literature to address questions of human liberty and knowledge.

Introduction

Introduction Eunice Lee (bio) Kim Myŏng-sun was modern Korea's first published woman writer. Her award-winning fiction debut in 1917, two full-length volumes of poetry, and vibrant oeuvre of more than 170 titles (including short stories, novels, poems, plays, essays, and translations) ushered in the first generation of sinyŏsŏng ("new woman") writers and creators including Na Hye-sŏk, Kim Ir-yŏp, and Kim Wŏn-ju. Kim Myŏng-sun was also a survivor of abuse and harassment. Her work has been marginalized from the canon, despite her literary versatility, her rigorous engagement with imperialistic and misogynistic mainstream narratives in colonial Chosŏn, and her indelible contributions to various genres of Korean writing. Kim Myŏng-sun was born in 1896 as the daughter of Pyongyang bureaucrat Kim Hŭi-gyŏng and his concubine Sanwŏl. T'an-sil (Kim's childhood nickname, later her pen name) struggled with the demonization of her mother's kisaeng (courtesan) status, and hoped that her own academic success would provide a way out of social stigmatization.1 After graduating fourth place from Chinmyŏng Girls' School in 1912, Kim moved to Japan and matriculated to Kōjimachi Girls' School in 1914, but a traumatic [End Page 353] incident prevented her from completing her studies. In 1915, Kim was raped by a colonial officer. Newspapers in Tokyo and Seoul released sensationalistic reports of the incident, non-consensually disclosing the survivor's name, age, and hometown.2 Early encounters with misogynistic violence would inform Kim's feminist writings throughout her literary career. In November 1917, Kim made her historical debut with "Suspicious Girl" ("Ŭisim ŭi sonyŏ"), a short story published in the magazine Youth (Ch'ŏngch'un, edited by Ch'oe Nam-sŏn), winning third place in a fiction contest judged by Yi Kwang-su.3 Kim thus became the first woman writer to debut in the modern tŭngdan system, i.e., make an official literary debut with a major journal acceptance and/or award. Kim followed "Suspicious Girl" with a series of yet more trailblazing firsts. In 1920, she joined the coterie of Creation (Ch'angjo) editors as the first Korean woman to join the masthead of a literary magazine. Her 1922 translation of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Assignation" ("Sangbong") made her the first known English-to-Korean translator of Poe.4 In 1923, Kim's one-act play Stepchild (Ŭibutchasik) made her the nation's first published woman playwright.5 In 1925, Kim became the first Korean woman to publish a poetry collection. Her first book, The Fruit of Life (Saengmyŏng ŭi kwasil; Hansŏng Tosŏ Chusik Hoesa, 1925), features twenty-four poems, seven of which I have translated for this issue.6 "Will" ("Yuŏn"), Kim's most widely read poem and a forceful manifesto against systemic abuse, skillfully synthesizes the specific and the [End Page 354] universal—while naming ("Chosŏn") and apostrophizing ("you brutal place") the nation that has repeatedly misused and abused her femininity, Kim's speaker also testifies for "the next person born like" herself, using the intentional ambiguity of this "like[ness]" to include various oppressed identities and their intersections. It is this spirit of solidarity in "Will" that I aim to replicate when I translate "na kat'ŭn saram" using the gender-neutral singular "they" ("Abuse the next person […] Abuse them"). Identities, voices, and bodies are porous and morphing, both in "Will" and in other poems from The Fruit of Life. The dreamscapes in "Cleft" ("Punsin") and "The South" ("Nambang") merge the spiritual with the physical, the exterior with the interior, the fruit with the body ("Passing by a farm dripping with tangerines, / she wears no frills"), trauma ("eyes tearful") with desire and hope ("But a song drifts to her ear"). The brutally realistic parable of "A Fight" ("Ssaum") demonstrates Kim's fluency in various modes of storytelling including anticolonial and anti-capitalist allegory: "the furrows were tough / and his landlord a ferocious man." Critic Nam Ŭn-hye observes that Kim weaves her poems together with an acute awareness of their intertextuality.7 The "Prayer" ("Kido"), "Dream" ("Kkum"), and "Sigh" ("T...

A comparison of the motifs of artist's obsession in „The Tattooer“ by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and „Tale of a Mad Painter“ by Kim Dong-in

This paper discusses similarities in the choices of plots and motifs in the short stories The Tattooer (1910) by Japanese writer Tanizaki Jun'ichirō and Tale of a Mad Painter (1935) by Korean writer Kim Dong-in, and hypothesizes a possible connection between them. In order to find out whether these works are really connected, common literary influences on both stories and analyzed stories’ structures and motifs were compared in this thesis. Results revealed that these two works were written under the influence of the same literary works: the theme of the relationship between art and violence and the motif of the artist obsessed with the desire to create an artistic masterpiece in The Tattooer and Tale of a Mad Painter are most likely inspired by Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Oval Portrait, while motifs of sexual perversions are inspired by Psychopathia Sexualis by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing. Not only two stories were written under the same influences, but the story Tale of a Mad Painter itself intertextually reworked Tanizaki’s The Tattooer adjusting motifs to Korean realities and making the structure more complex.

Edgar Allan Poe: Efemérides em trama

Edgar Allan Poe: Efemérides em trama

“The Black Cat” and Emmanuel Rhoides

Abstract This essay explores the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on Emmanuel Rhoides, the Greek writer and translator who, in 1877, first introduced the American author to a Greek audience. Granting the lack of research into Poe's impact on the Hellenic literary world, the note discusses “Ἱστορία ἑνὸς σκύλου” (“The Story of a Dog”) published by Rhoides in 1893, which bears clear but unexplored similarities to Poe's “The Black Cat.” The Greek story was printed alongside “Η Ιστορία μιας Γάτας,” a tale that has already been linked to the same Poe story in terms of content and structure. This comparison makes clear the extensive interest that Rhoides had in “The Black Cat,” and argues that the writer who introduced the American author's work in Greece was influenced by and used Poe's satire techniques in this and other tales. Finally, the note calls for additional, broader study of Poe's impact on modern Greek writing.

A Narrow Tale

Abstract This article, “A Narrow Tale,” is a creative response to Poe's work. A short story masquerading as a scholarly article with footnotes, “A Narrow Tale” purports to account for the artistic “failure” of Poe's short story “The Premature Burial” with recently unearthed biographical evidence.

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón and the Maelstrom

Pedro Antonio de Alarcón's short story "Los ojos negros" ends with the death of two rivals in the Maelstrom. That Arctic Ocean whirlpool has been the setting of many literary depictions of disaster or survival from almost certain death. Edgar Allan Poe used it as the focal point in his famous tale "A Descent into the Maelstrom." Alarcón's praise of Poe's description of a sailor's escape from the Maelstrom and his essay on the introduction of the American writer into Spain have suggested Poe's short story as a source for "Los ojos negros." Yet, the dates of these writings do not correlate and have perplexed scholars. The present study reveals more likely background and models for Alarcón's tale in two little examined Spanish periodicals, models that have textual similarities with "Los ojos negros" and pose no problems with respect to publication dates.

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City

A Forerunner of “A Descent into the Maelström”

A Forerunner of “A Descent into the Maelström”

Deadly Sins: “The Black Cat” as a Macabre Retelling of Genesis 1–4

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's personal religious feeling may have been uncertain, but the influence of the Bible on his works is not in question. Poems such as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” for instance, allude to ideal states not unlike that described in the creation story of Genesis, particularly the scriptural verses depicting the Garden of Eden. As in the biblical creation story—which provides the literary model of “paradise”—so in these poems: death has a lasting and adverse effect on happiness. In Genesis and “Annabel Lee,” moreover, malign influence undoes archetypal innocence. In much of his prose, too, Poe includes (sometimes telling) rhetorical references to the creation story, from the forbidden wisdom of “Ligeia” to the picturesque vale of “Landor's Cottage.” Allegorically, though, Poe's short story “The Black Cat” treats the creation story of Genesis 1–4 remarkably fully, moving beyond allusion as it essentially retells those chapters of Genesis in macabre form, describing an ideal state, original sin, and murder—the very outline of the biblical narrative itself.

The Dangerous Classes: Victorian Moral Rhetoric in Poe's “The Man of the Crowd”

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's enigmatic story “The Man of the Crowd,” featuring its voyeuristic narrator who pursues a mysterious old man through the streets of London, has proven to be one of his most critically challenging tales. Like the old man, the story resists easy classification. This ambiguity has resulted in much criticism from different schools. However, one significant element of the story that has not been greatly examined is the shift in the tone of the rhetoric used by the narrator between his descriptions of the genteel classes and the poorer classes of the crowd. Critics have not addressed the sociohistorical origins of the narrator's darker rhetoric or its contextual purpose. I argue in this essay, first, that Poe's choice of London is intentional and that the narrator's moralist rhetoric is based on the stereotypes then used by moral reformers, physicians, and periodical editors in England and Scotland to demonize the poor of the slums as the dangerous classes; second, that Poe uses these stereotypes ironically to reveal to the reader the restricted limits of the narrator's perception and understanding, unknown to the narrator, which make it impossible for him to comprehend the individual psyche of the old man; and third, that Poe in this story creates a new hybrid protagonist situated on the scale of ratiocination halfway between the irrational narrators of the tales of conscience and the supremely rational C. Auguste Dupin.

Public Speaking in Poe's “‘Thou Art the Man’”

Abstract Poe's last detective story, “‘Thou Art the Man,’” has received little attention and less praise. In this ingenious tale, however, Poe revises his own pioneering narrative technique by making the narrator—who faithfully records the actions and words of the character investigating the crime—turn out to be himself the detective. Charley Goodfellow, the supposed investigator, is actually the murderer, who uses his considerable oratorical skills to persuade an entire town to convict the wrong man. Given this emphasis on unreliable narration and deceptive oratory, it seems appropriate to read Poe's satirical detective story in the context of public speech during the Jacksonian period, including political rhetoric, abolitionist discourse, theatrical performance, and ventriloquism. In the tale's climactic scene, the narrator publicly accuses Goodfellow by throwing his voice, making it seem that the murdered man's corpse has identified him as the killer by uttering the title phrase aloud. That phrase alludes to Nathan's striking indictment of King David in the Bible, which in the early nineteenth century was extolled as a model of successful rhetoric and often imitated in abolitionist writing, including a passage from Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise that Poe read before writing his story. The narrator of “‘Thou Art the Man’” not only quotes Nathan's speech but also imitates his rhetorical strategy. Poe repeats both the speech and the strategy, in turn, in constructing his tale. “‘Thou Art the Man’” demonstrates that artful rhetoric ultimately leads to truth, even in an atmosphere of bullying, chicanery, spurious accusation, and deliberate falsehood.

Balancing the Risks and Benefits of Opioid Therapy: The Pill and the Pendulum

Over the past 20 years, the medicinal use of opioids has swung back and forth like a pendulum. However, unlike Edgar Allan Poe's classic short story, the likelihood of a last-second rescue seems remote. In the 1990s, a confluence of economic, medical, and governmental factors coalesced into a mutual driver of widespread prescription opioid use for chronic pain.1 The havoc wrought by this shift in prescribing practices ushered in the most devastating addiction crisis in US history. The ramifications of indiscriminate opioid prescribing are ubiquitous across the United States, and the statistics are grim.

Using PhET Simulations in the Mathematics Classroom

Imagine that you and your language arts colleagues are teaching Edgar Allan Poe's short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum.” This thrilling story takes us to the Inquisition during which a prisoner is surrounded by hungry rats and bound to a table while a large pendulum slowly descends. The prisoner believes that the pendulum is 30-40 feet long and estimates that it should take about 10-12 swings before he is hit, leaving him with about a minute or a minute and a half to escape. Are his estimations correct? If so, will he make it out in time?

Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet

Reviewed by: Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France by Andrea Goulet Zvezdana Ostojic (bio) Andrea Goulet. Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France. U of Pennsylvania P, 2016. 304 pages. In her 2016 book Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space and Crime Fiction in France, Andrea Goulet explores shifting extradiegetic scientific and philosophical paradigms through an extensive corpus of French crime literature ranging from mid-nineteenth century romans-feuilletons to late twentieth-century postmodern fiction. Throughout the pages of this profoundly erudite scholarly work, Goulet demonstrates the ways in which the vast body of literature she analyzes conditions the tension between the rational, deductive processes of the crime novel detective and the ultimately ambiguous nature of the violent crime. She weaves an intricate, deeply researched web of connections that spans over 150 years of modern French crime fiction and pinpoints the inaugural text of this genre's primary tropes in Edgar Alan Poe's short crime story The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841). However, what is innovative in Goulet's usage of Poe's story as foundational is her refusal to situate it as a normative text. She considers it rather as one that is "as non-normative—that is, as counter-rational, gruesome and conflicted—as any of the sensational murder narratives that were excised from the most purified accounts of the roman policier" (7). According to Goulet, French crime fiction inherited from Poe's story "two irresolvable tensions: between abstract intellection and bodily violence, and between (inter-) national politics and domestic privacy" (11). And indeed, as Goulet successfully illustrates, these tensions will continue to haunt French detective novels up through the most modern text she incorporates in her study—Dantec's cyberpunk novel Babylon Babies (1999). As she walks her reader across centuries and territories, Goulet extends her network of connections in two directions. On a "vertical" axis, she takes her reader deep below street-level Paris in an exploration of subterranean crime novels. On a "horizontal" axis Goulet emerges from the depths of Parisian catacombs to portray the cartographic dimensions of crime fiction, underlining the topographical aspect of detective investigation. Goulet's book is divided into three sections: "Archaeologies," "Intersections" and "Cartographies." In "Archaeologies" Goulet delves below ground level and explores catacomb crime gangs who subvert the apparent political [End Page 841] structure existing in the above-ground city. She argues that Cuvier's geological discoveries caused a shift in the comprehension and representations of time and space in nineteenth-century crime fiction. With close readings of Berthet's Paris avant l'histoire (1876) and Les Catacombes de Paris (1854), Labourieu's Les Carrières d'Amérique (1868), Guéroult and Couder's Les Étrangleurs de Paris (1859), Zaccone's Les Drames des catacombes (1861) and Lermina's Les Loups de Paris (1876) she succeeds in pointing out the ways in which these underground crime stories are deeply marked by Cuvierian catastrophism and prehistorical violence that challenge and subvert the above-ground horizontality and linearity of the Second Empire's Hausmannian Paris. These stories demonstrate how temporal linearity as well is subverted and superseded by a va-et-vient in which the prehistoric violent past continuously haunts the nineteenth-century spaces of modernity. Moving then to the Belle Époque's crime novels such as Leroux's La Double Vie de Théophraste Longuet (1904) and Souvestre and Allain's Fantômas: le bouquet tragique (1912), Goulet uncovers the underground world of larvae and ghosts who come to replace catacomb gangs. As Goulet approaches the first decades of the twentieth century she shifts her focus to "the intersections between national historiography and paleontological discourse" that she finds particularly noticeable in Gaston Leroux's Le Parfum de la dame en noir (1908) and Maurice Leblanc's "La Comtesse de Cagliostro" (1924), works that were directly influenced by advances in the domain of paleontology (80). What Goulet finds particularly noteworthy about these novels is that they share an omnipresence of oceanic space, and more importantly of coastal caves. This shared thematic results in their distancing from the urban metropolis and in an exploration of the "proto...

Death, Decay, and the Daguerreotype's Influence on “The Black Cat”

Abstract In “The Black Cat,” Poe's narrator discovers an odd pictorial representation of a crime he just committed. An “impression” of the cat he killed appears with astonishing accuracy—even the rope around the animal's neck—on his bedroom wall. This portrait resembles a daguerreotype in its placement, its durability, its verisimilitude, and its effect on viewers. The narrator's explanation for how it was produced alludes, moreover, to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre's pioneering technique for developing images on photosensitive plates that have been exposed in a camera obscura. Indeed, “The Black Cat” grotesquely parodies each step in Daguerre's procedure, as Poe himself depicted it in his initial essay on “The Daguerreotype.” The proliferating forms, figures, and facsimiles of the black cat—including how the story's second half recapitulates the first—recall other aspects of daguerreotypes, such as their print reproduction and their use in postmortem portraiture. Although the processes described in this story clearly suggest daguerreotypy, they produce different results. “The Black Cat” reflects not only Poe's familiarity with early photography but also his awareness of techniques for resisting or assisting decomposition, as explained by chemists like Humphry Davy, Justus von Liebig, and Alexander Petzholdt. Whereas early photography provided a means to preserve optical reflections—including those of family members who have died—Poe's narrator attempts to abolish such traces of the past. By modeling the macabre processes that the narrator describes on Daguerre's technique for developing latent photographic images, Poe's horror story transforms the very nature of the daguerreotype portrait to emphasize not preservation, but decay.

Forced Excursion: Walking as Disability in Joshua Ferris’s <em>The Unnamed</em>

Forced Excursion: Walking as Disability in Joshua Ferris’s <em>The Unnamed</em>

From the Editor

From the Editor