ABSTRACT |
Poe's adherence to romantic epistemology transforms many of his short
stories into psychic dramas that illustrate the struggle of a split self
in search for the unitary structures of the real. His tales are in many
respects exploratory acts and symbolic constructs of unity. Poe
subscribed the romantic epistemological division between Reason and
Understanding, grounded in the opposition between the essentially
intuitive, mythopoeic structures of the knowing mind and the pragmatic
categories of rational materialism. This paper analyzes the way in which
Poe's heroes, artists, criminals or detectives, stage the romantic
agon of unity and fragmentation.
|
