Abstract

Most studies of Edgar Allan Poe's ratiocinative texts view them as an origin of the classical detective genre. However, Poe himself urged that they be read as a central chapter in the virtual text of his collected works. Poe felt the analyst dramatized his insight that existence itself is structured like a literary work. Poetic imagination and reading are thus the key to his philosophy of detection, yet the intellectual consequences of this view of his ratiocinative texts were never explicitly developed by Poe and have been largely ignored by subsequent scholarship. ;This comparative study develops the consequences of Poe's claim by approaching his philosophy of detection as a question of reading, treating ratiocinative tales as part of a larger attempt to revise the traditional image of reason along more poetic or readerly lines. ;The dissertation is in five sections. The first two sections situate Poe's ratiocinative fiction in the framework of his collected works and view the analyst as an intersubjective rather than a positivistic thinker. The remaining sections reexamine Poe's analyst through the critical lenses of three writers who view Poe's work in terms of the intersubjective dynamics involved in the writer/reader relation rather than the speaker/hearer relation. They offer alternative keys to the analyst. German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin permits a reading of the analyst as an anti-modernist. Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin suggests a reading of the analyst as a dialogic thinker. And American philosopher Stanley Cavell enables an interpretation of the analyst as a parody or perversion of the skeptic. ;The study concludes the textually based models adopted by Poe and the three critics treated in its concluding chapters lead them to assign key roles to passivity and marginalization in the procedures of interpretation and understanding. Poe, Benjamin, Bakhtin, and Cavell construct the self of the reader, interpreter, or detective through a process of self-loss or self-surrender. Their critical perspectives thus open insights into Poe's often neglected anticipation of contemporary criticism's attempt to give various forms of otherness a principal role in the construction of identity and knowledge