Edgar Allan Poe: the Uncanny Other An MA thesis
Abstract
This dissertation examines the Freudian 'uncanny' in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and its role as a means of expressing his vision of American identity. It attempts to clarify Poe's transatlantic literary paradigm by creating a dialogue between a selection of his fictional and non-fictional texts, reading them alongside psychoanalysis and transatlantic literary criticism. The first chapter focuses on establishing the Freudian uncanny elements as a vital medium of expression in Poe's fiction that aims towards his unity of effect. This unity of effect is an emotional response that once the author determines, he/she decides tone, theme, setting, characters, conflict, and plot to achieve that very effect (of uncanniness). The chapter opens with a discussion of the concepts of creativity and its connection with madness and the uncanny, then explains the uncanny effect as part of Poe's theory of unity of effect. Two uncanny elements that chapter I focuses on are eyes and their association with castration anxiety and the uncanny double. To establish the basis for chapter II, chapter I reads a selection of Poe's short stories and critical texts together with some writings of Sigmund Freud and Julia Kristeva, and includes psycho-literary critical analysis of critics like Ann V. Bliss, Carrie Zlotnick-Woldenberg, Nicholas Canady, Sybil Wuletich-Brinberg. The second chapter builds on the idea of unity and carries it towards an expression of a transatlantic experience resulting in the formation of an image of an American identity. Works of critics such as Steve Brewer and Martin Jesinghausen, D.H. Lawrence, Williams Carlos Williams, Paul Giles, Maria Filippakopoulou elucidate Poe's transatlantic vision. Chapter II starts by explaining the uncanniness that Poe detects in America and Europe through their processes of mutual defamiliarizion, then discusses the double in relation to America, and concludes with a discussion of borderline existence and borderline doubling.
