Poe's Story Research Articles

Radial forcing and Edgar Allan Poe's lengthening pendulum

Inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum, we investigate a radially driven, lengthening pendulum. We first show that increasing the length of an undriven pendulum at a uniform rate does not amplify the oscillations in a manner consistent with the behavior of the scythe in Poe's story. We discuss parametric amplification and the transfer of energy (through the parameter of the pendulum's length) to the oscillating part of the system. In this manner, radial driving can easily and intuitively be understood, and the fundamental concept applied in many other areas. We propose and show by a numerical model that appropriately timed radial forcing can increase the oscillation amplitude in a manner consistent with Poe's story. Our analysis contributes a computational exploration of the complex harmonic motion that can result from radially driving a pendulum and sheds light on a mechanism by which oscillations can be amplified parametrically. These insights should prove especially valuable in the undergraduate physics classroom, where investigations into pendulums and oscillations are commonplace.

Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

Abstracts for the PSA Panels at the ALA

When stories travel: cross-cultural encounters between fiction and film

Adapting fiction into film is, as author Cristina Della Coletta asserts, a transformative encounter that takes place not just across media but across different cultures. In this book, Della Coletta explores what it means when the translation of fiction into film involves writers, directors, and audiences who belong to national, historical, and cultural formations different from that of the adapted work. In particular, Della Coletta examines narratives and films belonging to Italian, North American, French, and Argentine cultures. These include Luchino Visconti's adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Federico Fellini's version of Edgar Allan Poe's story Never Bet the Devil Your Head, Alain Corneau's film based on Antonio Tabucchi's Notturno indiano, and Bernardo Bertolucci's take on Jorge Luis Borges' Tema del traidor y del heroe. In her framework for analyzing these cross-cultural film adaptations, Della Coletta borrows from the philosophical of Hans-Georg Gadamer and calls for a hermeneutics of estrangement, a practice of mediation and adaptation that defines cultures, nations, selfhoods, and their aesthetic achievements in terms of their transformative encounters. Stories travel to unexpected and interesting places when adapted into film by people of diverse cultures. While the intended meaning of the author may not be perfectly reproduced, it still holds, Della Coletta argues, an equally valid and important intellectual claim upon its interpreters. With a firm grasp on the latest developments in adaptation theory, Della Coletta invites scholars of media studies, cultural history, comparative literature, and adaptation studies to deepen their understanding of this critical encounter between texts, writers, readers, and cultural movements.

“Que tous ses dents etaient des ideés”: Egaeus's Determination to Reassert Male Power in Edgar Allan Poe's BERENICE

In Edgar Allan Poe's gothic short story “Berenice,” Egaeus's obsessive fascination with Berenice's immaculate teeth can be superficially conceived as a madman's fixation, but his utterance of “Que ...

Resolving textual discrepancies in fictional story worlds: Two approaches and further suggestions

Abstract This essay compares two models for resolving textual discrepancies in fictional worlds: Tamar Yacobi's model of communication and Jan Alber's model of naturalizing unnatural narrative scenarios and events. I argue that irrespective of the specific mechanisms of integration, such approaches should satisfy at least four conditions: present a set of strategies broad enough to handle all types of textual discrepancies that the particular approach aims to encompass; make the most concise and precise distinctions between the different strategies; clarify the logical relations between the strategies; and explicate the relation of these strategies to the history of fictional narratives and of the strategies themselves. The essay critically examines both approaches and compares them in light of these four conditions. I complete the essay with a reading of Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Black Cat,” through which I illustrate my proposal for a combination and a modification of these two approaches.

Detective Fiction and “The Original Crime”: Baudrillard, Calle, Poe

Baudrillard appeared uninterested in the detective story and his work barely features in studies of the genre. This essay argues, however, that analyzing detective fiction from a Baudrillardian perspective – concentrating in particular on how the genre is structured around a tension between the forms Baudrillard termed “production” and “seduction” – can nonetheless illuminate how it works and enable us to reassess how far classic nineteenth-century detective fiction adhered to the principles of scientific logic, panopticism, and positivism. The essay begins by exploring detective fiction generally in relation to Baudrillardian approaches to the object and seduction before looking at two very different examples of detective fiction, but which turn out to explore the opposition between production and seduction in similar ways: the parodic detective dramas of the contemporary conceptual artist Sophie Calle, and Edgar Allan Poe's classic detective story, “The Purloined Letter.”

Edgar Allan Poe's Fear of Texts: "The Man of the Crowd" as Literary Monster

Poe introduces his story Man of with two epigrams in three languages: Ce grand malheur, de nepouvoir etre seul [Such a great misfortune, not to be able to be alone] (1) and was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen--it does not permit itself to be read (Tales 388). The story that follows is a first-person account of narrator's effort to pursue and apprehend a man whose idiosyncrasy of expression (392) has caught narrator's attention from its place within a crowd of Londoners. In end, wearied unto death (396), narrator abandons his efforts to interpret man, declaring him to be among those texts whose secrets hold the hideousness of mysteries which will not suffer themselves to be revealed (388). The concept of a text resistant to interpretation appears in many of Poe's tales via trope of an unreadable text; unreadable because it is either missing or has disappeared, is of mysterious provenance, or is a cryptogram. (2) In case of Te Man of Crowd, Poe considers how a text might be incomprehensible because it is in a foreign or non-existent language. What I hope to show is that, for Poe, foreign text is illustrative of certain interpretive problems inherent in reading and writing. Specifically, intertextuality and interlinguistics characterize unreadability of Man of Crowd insofar as he is compared to a German book. These two phenomena are among elements that, according to many theorists, open a given text to an external network of referents and meanings and make literature inherently antithetical to monolithic or unilateral interpretations. (3) They are also paradigmatic for what de Man might refer to as final undecidability of literature in general. (4) By focusing on particular kind of unintelligibility introduced by presence of foreign languages and references, I intend to investigate Poe's story as a local instance of literary undecideability. However, I also believe that it offers us an opportunity to understand problem, not as an abstract, universal formula, but in a historically-determined form. Ultimately, I hope to draw out richest sense in which, for Poe in America in 1840, every book was, in some sense, foreign. I will begin by tracing ways in which rational analysis and interpretive confidence give way to incomprehension on part of story's narrator. This decline into perplexity, I will show, is partly result of narrator's own intertextual interpretative apparatus. I will then turn to some of Poe's theoretical essays that directly address problems of literary closure. Although I believe these texts express a desire for mastery over meaning of a text, by charging them with theories derived from foreign philosophical traditions, Poe also effectively disrupts stability of concepts of literary openness and closure that these essays advance. Next, I will consider how Man of Crowd himself represents a text caught in an ambivalent relationship with society. On one hand, man depends on crowd for survival, while on other hand, he fails to relate socially to people surrounding him. If Man of Crowd can be understood as a text, then his associability is perhaps analogous to certain problems of textual interrelationships. This hypothesis will require a reevaluation of Poe's critical work, particularly his theories regarding novelty, wherein he imagines possibility of a literature that is radically autonomous from all other texts. During his lifetime, Poe was a great reader; he was a gifted student of both classical and modern languages (Silverman 23), and in his professional life he wrote a considerable amount of literary criticism, largely dealing with contemporary American fiction (Silverman 165), but also occasionally with foreign works. (5) It is no surprise, then, that Poe's tale is deeply layered with concerns regarding possibility of reading, writing, and understanding. …

Fear and humour in the art of cholera

Fear and humour in the art of cholera

World Congress on the Insulin Resistance Syndrome, 2009

This is the fourth of four articles summarizing presentations at the seventh World Congress on the Insulin Resistance Syndrome, held in San Francisco, California, on 5–7 November 2009. This installment pertains to insulin resistance (IR) mechanisms, the brain, and IR in youth and in the polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). ### Hyperinsulinemia and insulin secretion abnormalities #### Hyperinsulinemia causing IR. Jesse Roth (New York, NY) suggested that, rather than IR, hyperinsulinemia should be considered the major mediator of adverse outcome, with hyperinsulinemia the underlying characteristic of all syndromes of IR (1). Recalling Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Purloined Letter,” Roth argued that the mediator of IR is insulin, which is “hidden in plain sight,” causing hormone-induced inhibition of hormone action. Similar phenomena are seen in choriocarcinoma, in which enormous amounts of human chorionic gonadotropin have no biological effect, in the divergence between the effect of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which enhances fertility when given in a pulsatile fashion, while when administered continuously, it halts precocious puberty, or between the effect of parathormone given continuously, causing bone resorption, while bolus administration increases bone formation. High levels of insulin similarly decrease the effectiveness of insulin, and mice overexpressing the insulin gene, with doubling and quadrupling insulin levels, fail to show change in weight or fasting glucose, while developing IR, postprandial hyperglycemia, and decreased insulin receptor binding. Similar effects of hyperinsulinemia may be demonstrated in normal rats that are given increasing daily doses of insulin or that have hypothalamic damage, whereas ob/ob mice that are given alloxan or streptozotocin show improvement in insulin sensitivity. In humans, the Somogyi effect is of decreasing insulin doses improving glycemia, whereas patients with insulinoma develop IR, and pulsatile administration in a manner mimicking its physiologic release appears to have greater biologic effect than that of continuous infusion of a considerably greater amount of insulin (2). Basal insulin levels are twice …

The Dome of the Mind: Monticello in Weimar

At the opening of Poe's story, Fall of the House of Usher, the narrator encounters a lugubrious double of Roderick Usher in the form of his house. The vacant and eye-like windows are remarked upon twice; the parallel is reinforced by the connection between the minute fungi growing in a web-work across the eaves and Roderick's web-like hair, grown all unheeded, and even between the moulded chin and the moldy bricks. The mutual interp?n?tra? tion of spirit and matter in Poe's prose drags spirit into the tarn of signifying matter, confines the loftiness of reason in w7hat eventually appears, in Roderick's painting, as a sealed underground vault. The passage between body and mind in the figure of the house allows the commingling of the inorganic and the organic, of death and life. If the body is the temple of the spirit, it is also its casket and dungeon. The dome of the mind becomes the skull of the brain.

Objectless Curiosity: Frankenstein, The Station Agent, and Other Strange Narratives

Objectless Curiosity: Frankenstein, The Station Agent, and Other Strange Narratives Lorri Nandrea The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity. Dorothy Parker Early in Poe's first Dupin story, "Murders in the Rue Morgue," the narrator observes two distinct yet obliquely similar kinds of attention: that of Dupin, and that of a crowd gathered to gaze at the crime scene: We proceeded at once to the Rue Morgue. This is one of those miserable thoroughfares which intervene between the Rue Richelieu and the Rue St. Roch. It was late in the afternoon when we reached it; as this quarter is at a great distance from that in which we resided. The house was readily found; for there were still many persons gazing up at the closed shutters, with an objectless curiosity, from the opposite side of the way. It was an ordinary Parisian house, with a gateway, on one side of which was a glazed watch-box . . . Before going in we walked up the street, turned down an alley, and then, again turning, passed in the rear of the building—Dupin, meanwhile, examining the whole neighborhood, as well as the house, with a minuteness of attention for which I could see no possible object. (13, emphasis added) The narrator clearly perceives the "objectless curiosity" of the crowd as different from Dupin's "minuteness of attention," though the manner in which Dupin's attentiveness appears to lack an object links the two and invites consideration of what, if anything, does distinguish the crowd's "objectless curiosity" from the detective's examination. [End Page 335] As such, the passage may function as a starting point for investigating the differences between modes of curiosity represented in, and provoked by, narrative fiction. In particular, I hope to trace out, or track down, a routinely denigrated form of curiosity, here designated as "objectless," elsewhere as "idle," "mere," or "just." I intend to explore the possibility of understanding "objectless curiosity" as a mode of apprehending otherness, one that may sidestep dynamics of identification and permit an interestingly non-appropriative relationship to the phenomenal world.1 First, in the context of the story, it is clear that Dupin's minute scrutiny does have an "object," in the sense of a point or goal. He is reading clues and possibilities, attempting to solve the mystery. The narrator's failure to see the point of looking at the whole neighborhood is, as his diction suggests, attributable to his own obtuseness ("I could see no possible object"). Dupin's examination is oriented toward a future moment at which the past, which appears in the present enigmatic, will have been deciphered and fully explained. His act of looking is thus accompanied by an expectation of closure—as Dupin later puts it, "my expectation of reading the entire riddle" (15). By contrast, the crowd's presence appears to be motivated simply by the pleasure it generates in the present—not so much in the present as instantaneous "now"—you arrive and are satisfied—but rather in the prolongation or sustaining of the present pleasure of gazing. Thus, the crowd resists dispersal: Poe writes, "there were still many persons gazing up." Of course, one does not want to discount out of hand, or rather out of class bias, the possibility that these unnamed persons are also attempting to solve the mystery. Yet if we take seriously the narrator's implication that the crowd's curiosity is "objectless" in the sense of lacking an end goal, their gaze would signal a more passive, less rational, or less rationalized attraction to the rupture of the ordinary that has here taken place. The fact that the crowd remains stationary (while Dupin moves around) may suggest a mode of attention that differs from the active, essentially teleological investigation that progresses, through space and time, toward comprehension. Instead, the crowd's curiosity seems to rest with what is, in a sense, ahistorical in the present: what is out of sync, aberrant, disruptive, unexpected...

From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris

The ‘Rue Morgue’ of my title refers to an 1841 detective story by Edgar Allen Poe entitled ‘The murders in the Rue Morgue’.1 The story entails the detection of a non-human murderer. Dealing with the relation between animality and criminality, the crux of the plot involves audible but ambiguous animal cries that give no articulate testimony, but suggest pure affect and the difficulty of distinguishing an animal cry from a word uttered in a foreign language. If the mysterious world of detective fiction dominated Poe's Rue Morgue and the ‘extraordinary murders’ that took place there with the aid of a razor slash to the throat, it is rather the absence of detection that shapes Haneke's Rue des Iris in a disturbing thriller without a clear-cut crime (but nonetheless with a cut to the throat). The key question that confronts Haneke's film is the following: what, exactly, is caché? There are two frame narratives to Poe's story.2 The first involves a treatise on analytical powers and on the ingenuity of calculation that requires careful observation and the employment of memory. The second tells us of the relationship between our narrator and his unstoppable protagonist, C. Auguste Dupin, an avid reader and observer of all details, such that at times he can mind-read. ‘Books … were his sole luxuries, and in Paris these are easily obtained’.3 We soon come to understand, as we move into the main body of the story, that he is also an expert in reading the signs of a crime without attributing any particular motive to the logical connections that link these signs together. Dupin pieces together a possible narrative out of the resources available in the newspaper story that initiates the plot. Immediately, detection is associated with reading and with adequate interpretive skills. Dupin demonstrates that the sounds described in the testimonies given, rather than the assumed meanings of those sounds and stories, is essential. Eschewing a content-driven explanation, Dupin allows for the possibility of an arbitrary murder rather than a carefully plotted one. The human associated with the crime may not be directly guilty. However, as Dupin says, ‘I am now awaiting a person who, although perhaps not the perpetrator of these butcheries, must have been in some measure implicated in their perpetration. Of the worst portion of the crimes committed, it is probable that he is innocent.’4 This unwitting accomplice to the crime is a swarthy Mediterranean sailor from Malta. He is guilty, by association, of a larger economic crime than the one for which he may stand trial. Meanwhile, the aptly named M. Le Bon has been wrongly accused of the sailor's crime. The main perpetrator of the crime first manifests itself not through any visual evidence but through voice as evidence.5 Various witnesses report that they heard screams and then two voices – one gruff and the other shrill. The gruff voice (ultimately revealed to be that of the Maltese sailor) seems to have uttered ‘Mon Dieu’. Witnesses of different European nations and national languages claim the second voice sounded foreign, and each conjectures that it was a European language, but one that they did not know. ‘How strangely unusual must that voice have really been, about which such testimony as this could have been elicited! – in whose tones, even, denizens of the five great divisions of Europe could recognise nothing familiar! You will say that it might have been the voice of an Asiatic – of an African. Neither Asiatics nor Africans abound in Paris.’6 The foreign voice (which we too may have suspected was from the Antilles, La Réunion or Algeria, given the time frame and process of elimination in the story and its other colonial references) is revealed ultimately to be that of a non-human, an orangutan, in fact. Voice as distinct from language becomes the crucial marker of the trace of the animal rather than the human. Dupin identifies the beast through his reading of Cuvier, and through the beast from Borneo's digital calling-card, its finger or paw prints, which continue to exist beyond the presence of the animal itself, and which can be understood through a technology of reading the evidence. The orangutan's agency was also revealed by non-human agility and strength, which Dupin deduced from the escape route and the bodily marks left by the ferocity of the attack.

Legrands Opus Magnum: Der alchemistische Code in Edgar Allan Poes "The Gold-Bug"

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Gold-Bug", originally published in 1843, is one of his most cryptographic writings and his been subject to many interpretative approaches. I contend that the alchemical code hidden within the superficial framework of an adventure story permeates the entire tale and adds a coherent, yet mystifying, layer of meaning. Based on the findings of Barton Levi St. Armand in 1971, this article shows that Poe's numerous alchemichal allusions in this story form a detailed account of the so called opus magnum, the greatest quest of the alchemist, who 'is personified by the character Legrand. Furthermore, the alchemical code in "The Gold-Bug" demonstrates how the strife for material wealth is transformed through a process of ratiocination into a search for enlightenment. This reflects the original project of hermetic alchemy as well as Poe's critical perception of the economic and political turmoil of the 1840s

Ken Russell's The Debussy film (1965)

First telecast on 18 May 1965 as part of the BBC's Monitor series, The Debussy Film was Ken Russell's first fully-realized composer biopic—‘one of Russell's major contributions to the art of film b...

Teaching "The Sot-weed Factor" Out of Historical Context

Teaching "The Sot-weed Factor" Out of Historical Context Scott Peeples (bio) Most teachers of Early American Literature devote considerable time and energy to contextualizing (or intertextualizing) the poems, tracts, relations, narratives, and sermons on the syllabus. For good reason, Americanists have moved away from justifying the teaching of early texts by referring continually to cultural and literary traditions they establish or foreshadow, as if they were all merely precursors to the real American literature; instead, we encourage students to examine these texts in relation to their own times, their own discourse communities. That's certainly what I try to do in my pre-1800 survey—and yet, I think there are still useful ways to read early texts in light of later texts that reflect back on them. Think, for instance, of "A Modell of Christian Charity" and Ronald Reagan's repeated allusions to the "city upon a hill." A less obvious example, perhaps, is Ebenezer Cook's "The Sot-weed Factor" (1708). I say "less obvious" because, although the poem is frequently taught in early American courses, few students I have encountered are already familiar with either Cook's poem or John Barth's 1960 novel inspired by and named after it. Of course, Cook's "Sot-weed Factor" should be read in terms of European images of "the American" in the early eighteenth century, Chesapeake regional identity during that period, the economic and cultural importance of tobacco, the conventions of English satire in the period following the restoration, and so on. But in his essay in Teaching the Literatures of Early America, David Shields suggests an additional framework: This caricature of Maryland . . . dramatizes the problem of publicity: If reputation is everything, then how does one counter a bad report? You take its language and imagery and blow it up until it is a flagrant fiction incredible even to the dull-witted. This fantasy Maryland becomes disassociated with people's conceptions of the actual place. [End Page 351] Shields goes on to draw an analogy with caricatures of the modern-day South seen on Hee-Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard (132). I also think that temporarily leaping out of historical context can help students to better understand "The Sot-weed Factor," but I ask students to consider this poem as part of a comic, surreal tradition, in which a hapless everyman (usually an outsider) suffers exaggerated abuse and humiliation, staggering about in a constant state of confusion. The emphasis in these texts is on the compounding of misfortune; the audience, recognizing the exaggerated, comic nature of the story, enjoys seeing things go from bad to worse to even worse. We could probably all brainstorm various texts that continue this tradition, but my own list would include Poe's story "Loss of Breath," in which a man is continually mistaken for a corpse and subject to all manner of ill treatment, parts of Roughing It by Mark Twain, Harold Lloyd's silent films, and Martin Scorsese's After Hours. However, the text I use in class with "The Sot-weed Factor" is "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," which epitomizes this surrealist suffering tradition and offers several parallels with Cook, despite the fact that there's no evidence Dylan knew the poem. (It's worth noting that the song is particularly easy to incorporate into a class session because it takes up only 6½ minutes.) Often my students do not get "The Sot-weed Factor." They need to understand that Cook's intentions are comic. The anthology's head note can say it's comic, and the instructor can point out the objects of satire, the hyperbole and absurdity, and so on, but my students still don't process the poem as comedy. Presenting them with something obviously similar in its structure, in its tone, helps them to recognize what's familiar in the poem. "Dylan's 115th Dream" is much shorter than Cook's poem, and, as the title suggests, more dreamlike and surreal, but I tell my students that I think Dylan and Cook are playing the same kind of game, and that Cook's readers might have heard his poem much as Dylan's listeners heard...

Instructional Note: Inviting Students to Challenge the American Literature Syllabus

Suggests that it is easier to invigorate class discussion and stimulate critical thinking if students discover the constructed nature of the canon by first seeing that their notions about a “typical” Poe story have been shaped by an often invisible process of selection and exclusion.

Ornamental Illustrations in French Dictionaries

Ornamental Illustrations in French Dictionaries t: Thora van Male ''hat a dictionary simultaneously reflects the society which produces it and is a reflection of that society is an established fact, one of the tenets of metalexicography (Rey 1982, 5; Read 1998, 282; Boulanger 1994, 41; Landau 1989, 302). And though illustrations have often been considered by dictionary makers as useful, even necessary (Webster 1859, lxxxi and Larousse 1879, 13), the vast majority of writing in metalexicography focuses on the text alone, its macrostructure and microstructure. Neither dictionary specialists nor the general public have paid much attention to the ways in which dictionary illustrations also might reflect and be a reflection of society. Though the Petit Larousse Illustré, an illustrated encyclopedic dictionary, has been a staple in French households for nearly one hundred years,1 there has been litde study of its documentary illustrations and, as far as I have been able to discern , none of its ornamental and decorative illustrations. This state of affairs may well apply to the study of dictionaries outside of France as well,2 with the work that has been done devoted almost entirely to :André Rétif (1975, 308) estimates that some thirty million copies of the Petit Larousse Illustré viere sold between 1905 and 1975; according to Chartier and Martin (1985, 3.40), in the 1980s over 600,000 Petit Larousse Illustré dictionaries were sold annually. The head of Larousse announced in May 2000 that over one million copies of the year 2000 issue had already been sold. 2It would not be accurate to say there has been no work in this area. The following have made contributions worthy of interest: Archambault (1994); Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 22 (2001) 32Thora van Male documentary illustrations (particularly in specialized, historical, or learners' dictionaries) , or to the specific issues involved in adapting or designing dictionaries for modern information technology. There is a treasure trove in the area of ornamental dictionary illustrations:3 it would ultimately be possible to show how these decorations — like the lexicographic text itself, but outside of it — convey messages about society. This article considers ways of approaching ornamental illustrations in French dictionaries, the crux of which is the unique relation between letter and image. Rather than provide a definitive statement on the subject, the present article introduces readers to this "new" field and outlines some of the issues inherent in it. One cannot help but wonder why ornamental dictionary illustration has been ignored for so long, especially in France, where there is a history of ornamentation in dictionaries. Are these illustrations too obvious? Poe's short story, "The Purloined Letter," comes to mind: in two different instances, a letter (i.e., a missive) is "hidden" in a perfectiy visible place, in sight of those who have every reason to want to find it. Jacques Lacan comments on the story: "The very reason the letter is lying there, left carelessly on the table, is so that the king will not notice it. The queen is playing on the king's inattention, even his blindness to it" (1978, 229). And further on: "Here the letter is synonymous with the initial, radical subject. It is a symbol moving about in its pure state: if one touches it, one is immediately caught up in its dynamics " (1978, 231). Though one might not take Lacan literally here, the parallel is nonetheless tempting. Let us leave aside any play on Barthes (1972, 89-104) in his study of the plates of the Encyclopédie, Corbin (2000); Dimier (1977, 221-309) in his doctoral dissertation on the Petit Larousse, Hancher (1988, 1992, and 1996); Hupka (1984 and 1989); Landau (1989, 111-115); Pruvost (1994), whose article opens with these words: "Dictionary illustration remains a very poorly known sector which has given rise to little research"; Rey (1982, 44-48); Rey-Debove (1971, 34-35 and 1984); Stein (1991); Werner (1982); and Zgusta (1989). All except Zgusta dwell almost entirely upon the documentary, rather than the ornamental, aspect. Perhaps Dimier also had ornamental illustrations in mind when he stated that "We think that what is characteristic of the Petit Larousse is contained in what some might consider secondary aspects...

Beyond his story: from interpretation to impact of stories from different cultures

This paper deals with the history of psychoanalysis (Freud) and analytical psychology (Jung) in the light of recent developments and considers the release of new creativity in the field after its deconstruction. Cross‐cultural contributions in the form of teaching stories are estimated to be of relevance, while the emphasis will be on what we, as analysts, can learn from these teachings, rather than interpreting them in the more traditional way in which such stories can be shown to fit analytical theory.The most crucial debate in psychoanalysis of the recent era centres around stories and the deconstruction thereof. It is the debate between Lacan and Derrida on the interpretation of a crucial story (Poe's story, The Purloined Letter). The core of their views will be discussed in this paper in the light of the major differences between Freud and Jung. Whereas Freud's theoretical core‐complex is closely related to Lacan's phallocentric Truth, it is Derrida who speaks of germination and dissemination as the way in which Truth manifests itself. Derrida's thought on text and words is very close to Jung's conceptions of the image and symbol, in which there is no monotheistic paradigm ruling theory

Games of hide and seek: Race, gender and drag in the crying game and the birdcage

This article argues that contemporary film drag has become the vehicle for the revival of race and gender stereotypes, a blackface for the nineties, camouflaged by drag's new status as a “subversive” performance. The logic of masking and unmasking that drag promotes lends itself to a double bluff, wherein the masks worn reveal rather than conceal the politics of the performance. Through a reading of The Crying Game and The Birdcage, I elucidate the mechanics of this double bluff and suggest how it challenges a simple labeling of performance as either true or false. This argument invites reconsideration of how ideology operates. Borrowing from Poe's classic story of the purloined letter, I indicate ways in which genres of the obvious may derive their power from assumptions, post‐Foucault, that oppressive ideologies are intelligent, self‐effacing and hard to detect.

Poe's "Diddling" and the Depression: Notes on the Sources of Swindling

In recent article for Poe Studies, John E. Reilly discusses the possible sources for Poe's satire on swindling, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences.(1) Disputing previous assumptions, Reilly argues that Poe's story may be derived from actual newspaper reports rather than from James Kenney's 1803 farce Raising the Wind. I would like to bring forward additional evidence concerning the background of Poe's tale and the representation of swindling in antebellum American culture. pertinent texts appeared in the Corsair and the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, publications with which Poe was generally familiar. Tales in these two magazines help to clarify the popular meaning of such terms as diddling and the wind, and they also provide further evidence about the composition date of Poe's tale and its possible debt to Kenney's play. More importantly, these texts serve to enlarge the frame of reference for Poe's tale, thereby facilitating the crucial transition from literary source to the full context of literary production. Corsair was short-lived New York weekly founded by Timothy O. Porter and N. P. Willis; as suggested by its name, the sailing orders dictated that the magazine overhaul every craft on the literary seas - ransack her lading - take out of her what is valuable, and send her on her voyage.(2) On January 25, 1840, the Corsair published The Romance of Day: A Passage in the Life of an Adventurer. story is important because it translates elements of Kenney's farce into form more suitable to mass-circulation magazines and newspapers. central character is named Dick Diddler, distant connexion, by the mother's side, of the famous Jeremy, immortalized by Kenney. Unlike Kenney's somewhat bumbling rogue, Dick is described as a shrewd, reckless adventurer, gifted with an elastic conscience that would stretch like Indian-rubber, and genius for raising the unsurpassed by AEolus himself (p. 733). Penniless and beset by creditors, Dick convinces Priscilla - rich, ancient virgin - to elope with him at the end of the story. Reilly points out that Kenney's play ends with about the need for poor idle rogues to engage in honest industry.(3) The Romance of Day, however, eschews such didacticism, concluding instead with very different kind of moral lesson: he who at nine o'clock in the morning was an adventurer without sixpence in his pocket, by the same hour in the evening was gentleman in possession of woman worth eight hundred pounds per annum! - Gentle reader, truth is strange, - stranger than fiction (p. 736). On the one hand, then, the Corsair provides further substantiation for Reilly's rejection of Kenney's farce as source. The Romance of Day demonstrates that Diddler and the wind were sufficiently well known to appear without annotation in the popular press. On the other hand, however, the story demonstrates that concepts in transition simultaneously look back to old sources and forward to new connotations. Since The Romance of Day borrows so heavily from Kenney's Raising the Wind, Poe might have known something about the plot of the original farce even if he had never seen it performed. This in turn would have made Poe aware of the differences between the original Jeremy and the contemporary association of diddling with crime, financial panic, and the breakdown of order.(4) Thus it is difficult to say if ignorance or opportunism inspired Poe to make these differences even more extreme - and more extremely rational - in Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences. Corsair is important for other reasons. August 10, 1839 issue, for example, contains Richard Johns' The Raven, bad gothic poem about flesh-eating bird (p. 337). Other issues contained such titles as Robbery of Love Letters (p. 731), Cursory Cogitations Concerning Cats (p. …