Meridian Critic

In Eureka, Poe counterposes to the creationism of the great monotheist religions (Biblical and rabbinical Judaism, Christianity, Islam) an intransitive cosmogonic model: the universe was not created, but emanated from an 'elementary particle' (autogeny). Analogously, the fictional universe of Poe's fantastic tales emerges from an autogenic matrix, whose catamorphic configuration accounts for their structural and psycho-thematic stereotypy: circumscribed spaces, premature burials, acro- and claustrophobia, regressive processes (catabasis, catalepsy, sleep, delirium, death, etc.).

Poe’s strategy of “diddling” is mostly visible in his stories with unreliable narrators. One such example is The Cask of Amontillado where Montresor tells a story of revenge and perfect crime that turns out to be the last confession of a repentant Christian or, more properly, the ritual of immolation performed by a devout Mason. All these “levels” of interpretation are not in fact paradoxical, since Poe himself articulates them as part of an ad infinitum process of deconstruction prefiguring Jacques Derrida.

Poe’s reputation as the master of the mystery stories that draw the reader to the inscrutable worlds of horror, the uncanny, and suspension has marked him as a “readable” writer. This article argues that “The Purloined Letter” becomes “unreadable” through the mise en abyme that complicates the role of the detective and the nature of the case, as a result of which the conventions of the genre are rendered unforeseeable. Thus, the all-seeing reader entailed by Poe’s philosophy of composition is replaced by the blind reader, while “The Purloined Letter” undermines its truth by leading the reader to undo what he/she reads.

Starting from E. A. Poe’s The Gold Bug, the present paper traces the changes determined by the transformation of an epic text into a dramatic script, more specifically into a radio script. Neighbouring the fantastic genre, Poe’s text evinces the writer’s interest in the conception and solution of a riddle, asserting Poe’s conviction that there are rules / codes able to solve any hieroglyphic writing by using, indifferently, any other pattern than the alphabet... The cryptanalysis elicited by the source text is inevitably limited in the dramatisation of the original story, and all the more so in the radio script. Many details meant to lead to the solution of the riddle in the source text cannot be preserved in an audio book, since the visual element disappears here. Aural art imposes its own laws / codes of interpretation of a literary discourse, and, although it eliminates some details from the written text, it can increase interest in a literary work owing, firstly, to its larger audience.

While the evil was a constitutive concept in theology and philosophy in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the process of rationalization reduced its meaning to pathological abnormalities in medicine and psychology. The disintegration of metaphysics made the idea of an absolute evil, together with the devil, increasingly untenable. The period around 1800 witnessed a return of the evil, no longer defined in theological terms but as a revolt against rational theories of morality and a narrow definition of the human soul. Among the 19th century pioneers of this anti-modernist dark modernism was Edgar Allan Poe. His short story Hop Frog refers back to the medieval image of the frog as the animal of the devil and embodiment of the absolute evil. The struggle between an evil king and the man-frog hybrid is a literary fantasy about the continued presence of the irrational under conditions of modernity and the power of the perverse as an insoluble problem.

This essay investigates the relationship of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and the visual arts. After reviewing former research on the significance of the allusion to Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare and the description of Roderick Usher’s pictures in the story, it proposes an intermedial reading in the light of Lucio Fontanas ‘slash’ paintings. This leads to the assumption that the House of Usher is in fact a tableau of the eponymous building.

After criticizing the original version and its translations done by Baudelaire and Mallarmé in several conferences and essays, Bonnefoy made his own and personal interpretation-appropriation of “The Raven” in a recent poem. Starting with a fast review of these critics and those of others dealing with Poe’s influence on the French poets and Poe’s translation, the analysis of Bonnefoy’s “hypertext” reveals how and why Bonnefoy changed some basic components of Poe’s poem.

The paper argues that, in The Domain of Arnheim, Romantic aesthetics, and its associated defenses of the self, is represented in its confrontation with the centrifugal, overwhelming power of capital. The story may be read as an inscription of Poe's ambivalent response to the changes in the cultural perceptions and the tensions and contradictions of modern age, as his exploration of the relationships between aesthetics and economics, art and nature, the private and the public, capital and nature, and their bearing on artistic individuality.

My essay tries to retrace La Bruyère’s question for the causes of moral or immoral turns in human life in Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” which hints to this problem by its motto. Poe takes sceptical distance from the idea of a physiognomical transparency of good or evil, which is emphasized by means of a comparison to Dickens and E.T.A. Hoffmann. Poe, instead, creates a specifically modern view on human morality, traces of which may be found even in contemporary German novels.

In the year of his bicentenary, Poe is still widely known due to his tales. Nonetheless, Poe was eminently a man of letters, concerned about unraveling his poetics in his essays “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition”, editing his own journal, as well as publishing extensive reviews of many contemporary American and English authors. Poe reviewed many of Bulwer-Lytton’s works, thus acknowledging he knew the Victorian writer’s novels quite in depth. From a comparative and postmodern perspective, taking as a precedent works by critics such as Burton R. Pollin, this article aims at exploring the way Bulwer’s works, especially Rienzi, may have influenced Poe, as well as the way Poe’s status as an American writer may be re-evaluated through transatlantic reception.

In Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” the underlying intimation of the incestuous union between twin siblings, Roderick and Madeline, serves as an extension of Poe’s use of the doppelganger motif. My paper explores this insinuation of sibling incest, apparently left out of the scholarly conversation on this particular tale, as an ingredient of the Gothic mode. The allusion to incest in “The Fall of the House of Usher” is directly related to the characters’ slow and withering demise. More importantly, it is outright related to the violent deaths of both brother and sister.

The paper overviews Vladimir Streinu’s perspective on Edgar Allan Poe’ aesthetic ideas. In two articles, the Romanian literary critic integrates Poe’s poetic principles into European modern poetry, detecting influences and differences in Baudelaire’s, Mallarmé’s, and Valéry’s, or develops an unxpected comparison between a rather traditional Romanian critic, Titu Maiorescu, and the American poet.

The distinctiveness of Poe’s style is one of the defining characteristics of his work. Questions of intention, genre, tone and aesthetic achievement are inextricably bound up with it. A story like “Loss of Breath” is typical in this regard. This style has often made Poe the subject of parody, yet in order to write successful imitations of Poe one must conjure with the complex questions that his style raises. Nabokov’s treatment of Poe is instructive in this regard. Nabokov’s critics have helpfully pointed out the innumerable links between the two writers, but his multiple concerns as a novelist and his dismissive attitude to his great nineteenth-century forebear prevent him from writing the sort of parody he is often given credit for.

The present article argues that Poe’s “Mystery of Marie Rogêt” exceeds the bounds of a ratiocination story of detection, straying from its nominal aim to examine a crime and expose a murderer, focusing instead on the victim’s body with a manic minuteness that can be attributed to the voyeur’s absorption rather than to the detective’s inquiry. Since flesh is made text, what Dupin scrutinises with the aim of normalising is not actually the body but the text. Through the mutilation of the text, both murderer and woman are engulfed within the non-text of oblivion, which is, for the former, a confirmation of his instrumentality and, for the latter, a second death.

This study makes two arguments, regarding first of all the performativity of memory in “Legeia” and following that, the performativity of gender inferred from the female body figured as memory. In Poe’s tales, memory functions as a medium for past experience, being its theatre, rather than an instrument for past experience (Walter Benjamin, “A Berlin Chronicle”). In “Legeia,” the act of remembrance, which also constitutes the narrative act, takes the form of the narrator’s macabre re-membering of Legeia’s body, a body that ultimately resists the narrator’s attempts to confine it within the boundaries of his creative endeavour.

Mircea Nedelciu’s short-stories display a textual structure inserted by its own meta-textual hints, defining itself as a covert Postmodern literary poetics / poietics. Thus Nedelciu’s texts may be interpreted from two points of view at least. The first would be the parodical discreditation of literature and critical discourse as well as of the existential pattern promoted before 1989. The second reading perpective would focus on the literary text as meaning-producing praxis within the writing domain.

Unity and diversity, originality and movement, singularity and plurality are the keyterms that are exploited in Assia Djebar’s masterpiece Les Impatients. Dalila, the young woman from Algiers is against the unconditional submission of woman, fighting against a patriarchal society. Tradition and innovation are in opposition, and this masterpiece reflects this aspect very well.

The present paper, implicitly polemic, is a fragment of a more elaborate study and aims at redefining I. L. Caragiale’s work, by setting it not in the realm of mimesis, but in that of questioning the immediate reality from an onthological perspective. Apparently exploring the real, I.L. Caragiale’s writing questions the hypothetical, the text becoming both creation and interpretation of the world. Thus, in I. L. Caragiale’s work, the aproximation of nothingness does not provoke, in a postmodern manner, a crisis of anguish and alienation, but it generates fascination and hedonism.

The paper examines Roland Barthes’s Bereavement Diary as a monument dedicated to his mother, founding figure of the ethical-aesthetic value of his creative spirit and of his writing. The Barthesian writing, seen as implementation of the truth that founds a new world, which is revealed by the hermeneutic of a self whose meaning is reconsidered from the perspective of a “weak ontology,” is read against Heideggerian aesthetics as interpreted by Vattimo. The Diary is a virtual work, architectonically imagined, a writing-as-origin multiplying itself in other concomitant texts, which raise a monument on an ornamental aesthetic thinking.

This article analyzes the development of urban culture(s) in the American West, focusing mainly on cattle towns, precursors of many contemporary large towns and cities. Special attention is given to the way in which the Western movie took possession of the short, but intense history of these urban units and stereotyped it, offering audiences a myth-history which was to become the main perspective in the decades that followed.

Irina Mavrodin is one of the most outstanding figures of Romanian French studies. The article deals with various aspects of Irina Mavrodin's work, as a translator of French literature (especially the Proustian novel), as an essay writer (she had several Romanian Academy awards) and as a poet, who wrote both in Romanian and in French.