A Deconstructive Glance at Edgar Allan Poe's The City in the Sea

Fleming, Thomas. "Poe, Edgar Allan." ["Reader's Companion to American History"]. Reader's Companion to American History, Jan. 1991, p. 846. EBSCOhost, proxygsu-wgt1.galileo.usg.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=khh&AN=27829334&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Poe is known for the death of a beautiful woman, but in fact, he has presented various types of the female in his prose and verse. In actuality, influenced by his own experiences, and the time in which he lived, from the

When you think about the first detective story ever written, Edgar Allen Poe probably doesn’t come to mind. He is most known for his melancholic and gruesome tales of stories such as a guilty man’s conscience giving him the impression of hearing the man he killed heart beating through the floorboards, or even a raven symbolizing the inevitable death we will all face. Despite these well-known contributions, his writings concerning the detective field have left an indisputable mark on pieces following his time.

As he did continuously in his writing, Poe has left us with yet another mystery: the cause of his death. This conundrum has tormented scholars for decades. Was it rabies, meningitis, or even a brain lesion? Edgar Allan Poe’s cause of death was never official. His physician listed it as “congestion of the brain” on his death certificate, yet there was no way of knowing, especially since there was no autopsy performed. Many scholars do not agree with the physician’s diagnosis. Oddly, most of these scholars believe that Poe died as a result of rabies. Many other theories have been suggested such as a heart condition, meningitis, and diabetes. Although most people who have theorized about Poe’s death believe

Poe uses the setting of the Indian Ocean, an exotic area of the world in the 1800s, to isolate both the reader and protagonist from Western civilization and instill a foreboding sense of danger. Meanwhile, the Discovery, where the protagonist is socially invisible, serves to isolate the reader demonstrate how Poe feels in society and to unsettle the reader. Likewise, the Antarctic, a desolate wasteland of ice, whose glaciers are the “walls of the universe”, the ship to shrouded in a eternal night and in a plain of foamless, but tumultuous water; Poe primarily uses this setting to describe how he feels when physical isolated, serving to contrast how the reader feels when their isolated socially versus physical

Poe is a very complicated author. His literary works are perplexed, disturbing, and even grotesque. His frequent illnesses may have provoked his engrossment in such things. In 1842 Dr. John W. Francis diagnosed Poe with sympathetic heart trouble as well as brain congestion. He also noted Poe's inability to withstand stimulants such as drugs and alcohol (Phillips 1508). These factors may have motivated him to write The Tell-Tale-Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Black Cat. All of these stories are written in or around 1843, shortly after Poe became afflicted. His writing helped him to cope with his troubles and explore new territory in literature. Poe's interest in the supernatural, retribution, and perverse cause them to be included

New Historicism is a school of criticism that is “influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, [and] seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time” (Purdue Owl). With this school of criticism, every work that is created is considered a product of the moment in history that it references. Historical criticism insists that readers need to understand

Figurative devices are used in this poem to further develop the tone/mood, the environment/setting and the senses the speaker is feeling in the poem. Poe gives the water an emotion. The “sad waters” is a personification of the water being sad. This helps further explain the way the speaker is grieving or suffering. Personification is also used when Poe describes the spirits and beings in the poem to be human. This is shown in the lines “Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, on a black throne reigns

Edgar Allan Poe can be considered as one of America’s darkest poetry writers ever in american literature. He was most often remembered for the short stories he wrote. Most of his stories reflected based on his past, but none seemed to have had a happy ending. So what sparked inside of Poe to bring his ideas to life? In Poe’s literary works ”The Raven” and “The Bells” death predominates the style, characters, and symbols through the use of his vivid and original imaginations.

Edgar Allan Poe, a well-known writer even today, was born January 19, 1809, and died October 7, 1848. During his life time, Poe had written sixty-six short stories and seventy poems, and his writing was inspired by a dark past. Poe’s mother died of tuberculosis after his father abandoned them. Then, while living with a foster family, his foster mother died and his foster father disliked him. These events caused Poe to have a particular style of writing and in each of these a reader is able to see similarities between the characters, theme, setting, and Poe’s use of symbolism. In ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ a reader can make these connections and see how Edgar Allan Poe put his feelings into words.

New Criticism is an unusual and dying theory in this generation. In today's age, people analyze and rate a piece of text on impact it has on the individual person or society. New Criticism eliminates feelings,ratings and the impact a piece of had but rather focuses on the text itself. New Criticism, incorporating Formalism, examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form, between what a text says and the way it says it. New Critics "may find tension, irony, or paradox in this relation, but they usually resolve it into unity and coherence of meaning" (Biddle 100).

The next stanza describes the speaker as standing alone by the sea. The loud sounds of the ocean represent his growing anguish of being isolated by his own feeling of doubt. The sound of the waves intensifies the feeling of anger and confusion Poe feels toward himself and his “relationship”. By standing by the sea, Poe is isolating himself form the opportunity of realizing whether him and his lover’s love is real. At the end of the final stanza Poe inquires himself again with the reoccurring question “is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

86) Coined as a term by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, Deconstruction reached the peak of its acclaim in the early 1970’s. The movement rebelled against Structuralism which reads a given text as a single cohesive whole, and leaves no room for flexibility. In Structuralism, there are right and wrong answers, in Deconstruction however, there is never a perception of right or wrong, it is simply a constructed or deconstructed view of the text. Deconstruction strives to take the perceived meaning of the text, and distort that meaning until it becomes the complete opposite of the first meaning. Parker states in his book, How to Interpret Literature, “Deconstructionist interpretation frequently follows what has come to be called a double reading.” (pg. 89) The first reading and critic usually follows a lens which a Structuralist would argue is the ‘true’ meaning of the text. The second reading takes this binary, stable interpretation and begins to argue against it, destabilizing the proposed meaning. “It is not hard to do a double reading, because we can always find something that troubles or breaks up the system. But it is harder to do a double reading well, because to do it well we have to find something that breaks up the system in interesting ways.” (Parker, pg. 89) The object of a Deconstructionist approach is to convince the reader that they are right, and then convince the reader that there is an even better interpretation. Looking at multiple meanings provide the reader with perceptions and ideas that are often not accepted in society, and therefore gives voices to minority groups such as Feminism, Queer, and Youth Theories, fairly recent lenses in the literary

Author Edgar Allen Poe wrote dark tales and poems. His troubles began when he was only a child. First his father left and then his mother died before he was three years old. After he was adopted, his foster parents wanted him to follow in their footsteps. After a while though he parted ways with them. His adult life was full of poverty, alcoholism, and unhappiness. When he decided to marry he married his thirteen year old cousin Virginia Clemm.

“The City in the Sea” Poe expresses his views about a city in the west that is ran by Death. For instance Poe states “While from a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.”(28, 29).This tells the reader that death is ruling the city. In this piece by Poe the poem depicts death and presents it in an unorthodox way. It is viewed as a god that watches over a magnificent, peaceful city in the far west. The city is massive and godly as Poe states “Domes and spires and kingly halls, and fanes and Babylon like walls.” (17, 18). Poe says the city is in the west because sun sets in the west, this has traditionally been associated with death. At the conclusion of the poem Poe suggest that something isn’t right as he speaks of