Despejando incógnitas sobre "El Clavo" (1853) de Pedro Antonio de Alarcón (1833-1891): relato policiaco o novela romántica

La presente colaboración pretende arrojar luz sobre una polémica que hasta la fecha mantiene abierta la crítica literaria: ¿es El clavo (1853), de Pedro Antonio de Alarcón un relato policiaco que sigue las huellas de Edgar Allan Poe, como inventor del género, o más bien es una novela romántica al uso? A través de un completo análisis contrastivo entre el texto alarconiano y Los crímenes de la calle Morgue (1841), de Poe, llegamos a la conclusión de que Alarcón no sigue las pautas marcadas por Poe, pues el protagonista del texto del guadijeño no recurre al "discurso de la racionalidad" ni al método deductivo para hallar la solución al crimen relatado.Nuestro estudio deja claro que el detective C. Auguste Dupin mantiene en vilo al lector con el suspense y la intriga que emanan de sus actuaciones, mientras que el juez Zarco antepone los asuntos sentimentales a la investigación detectivesca.

From Hamlet to Holmes: literary detective tradition

Exposed to the mystery of his father’s suspicious death, young Hamlet followed the riddle of solving it in the longest tragedy of Shakespeare. By suspension and the lengthy nature of detective works, Shakespeare seems to have initiated a new subgenre in drama which may have later on been converted into an independent subgenre in the novel by Edgar Allan Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie through their imaginative characters, Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes and the pair of Hercules Poirot with Miss Marple respectively. Fyodor Dostoevsky may have also spread the net of Hamletian subtext in his Crime and Punishment. Plotting a perfect crime by the murderers and the public approval of the plan, on one hand, and the inconvincible mind of the hero which ultimately undo the seemingly unsolvable puzzle, on the other, construct the very core of all aforementioned works of Shakespeare, Poe, and Doyle. The unanticipated and unpredicted findings of either Holmes or Hamlet defeat the expectations of the audience and bring the runaway justice back to her groom.

E. A. Poe and F. M. Dostoevsky: The Origin And Questioning of Crime Fiction

Crime fiction originated in the mid-nineteenth century, at a time of great positivistic confidence in the potential of human knowledge. Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories are considered as the beginning of the genre, and his character Auguste Dupin is the first modern literary detective. F. M. Dostoevsky did not write crime novels because the elements of the genre present in his novels participate in the construction of a different kind. However, this paper will try to look in more detail at the key differences between Dostoevsky and the classical rules of crime fiction, on the example of the novel “Crime and Punishment”.A deeper understanding of these differences reveals the limits of the genre, while in Dostoevsky one can recognize one of the early critiques of the fundamental principles and world picture that the genre represents.

Erraticism in the Cannibal – A Study of the Work of Thomas Harris

Literature is the key to human life that resurrects and gives space for introspection, retrospection and various remembrances which are hued by overjoy, pain and trauma. Nowadays crime literature became one of the most popular genres in this era which centers mostly on murder and violence. It started from Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous fictional character Auguste Dupin, whose first appearance was on The Murders in the Rue Mogue, considered to be the first crime fiction, followed by Dr. John Watson, Sherlock Holmes and the like. The genre crime fiction has contributed innumerable number of works in both fiction and non-fiction. Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising is one such fiction which tells about the life of a serial killer who is a psychiatrist as well as a cannibal. It is a series of novels about the famous character Hannibal Lecter. Cannibalism and Psychiatry are two extremes which rarely meet. This novel is intertwined with a mix of violence, emotions and childhood trauma. Trauma studies nowadays became a key aspect in literature. In this specific work of Thomas Harris, he describes how the centralized character is affected with psychological trauma, in particular, Acute and Separation trauma. Trauma theory became popularized in 1980s and played major role in Atwood’s novels. This study tries to explain how childhood shapes a person and how behaviorism plays a vital element in one’s life and it also tries to analyze the psychological issues, trauma and defense mechanism through the central character of the novel.

A GROTESQUERIE PARISIENSE: TRAÇOS DO INSÓLITO NA NARRATIVA POLICIAL DE EDGAR ALLAN POE

Edgar Allan Poe foi o criador de uma obra cuja grandeza artística é proporcional à heterogeneidade que a compõe. Fora do mérito de se tratar de um dos inventores da narrativa detetivesca, o autor legou à posteridade uma série de contos, poemas, ensaios e correspondências, tangendo desde os temas clássicos da literatura fantástica até uma produção humorística e tantos exemplos de ficção à moda especulativa de caráter filosófico. Por tanta variedade, não foram poucas as tentativas de segmentar sua obra conforme seus temas. Em meio a esse esforço de classificação, tornou-se habitual que se considerasse que os contos de raciocínio, grupo que reuniria os três relatos do detetive C. Auguste Dupin e alguns outros afins, estaria destacado dos demais. A justificativa passa, em alguma medida, pela defesa do contraste provocado pela aura de esclarecimento que permeia o conto policial, reflexo de um mundo desejoso de se organizar pelo conhecimento e pelos desenvolvimentos tecnológicos, contra os impulsos nervosos herdados pela influência gótica, influindo especialmente sobre seus contos de horror. Entretanto, a narrativa que perpassa os acontecimentos que circundam o assassinato brutal de mãe e filha em uma Paris em plena ebulição ressoa em outros contos do autor, seja pela criação de atmosfera, seja pelas impressões comunicadas pelos respectivos narradores-testemunhas. O objetivo deste artigo será o de refletir a respeito das semelhanças entre a narrativa detetivesca de Edgar Allan Poe, a partir do conto “Os assassinatos na rua Morgue”, e algumas de suas narrativas fantásticas.

The Theory of Cognitive Consciousness, and Λ (Lambda)

We provide an overview of the theory of cognitive consciousness (TCC), and of [Formula: see text]; the latter provides a means of measuring the amount of cognitive consciousness present in a given cognizer, whether natural or artificial, at a given time, along a number of different dimensions. TCC and [Formula: see text] stand in stark contrast to Tononi’s Integrated information Theory (IIT) and [Formula: see text]. We believe, for reasons we present, that the former pair is superior to the latter. TCC includes a formal axiomatic theory, [Formula: see text], the 12 axioms of which we present and briefly comment upon herein; no such formal theory accompanies IIT/[Formula: see text]. TCC/[Formula: see text] and IIT/[Formula: see text] each offer radically different verdicts as to whether and to what degree AIs of yesterday, today, and tomorrow were/are/will be conscious. Another noteworthy difference between TCC/[Formula: see text] and IIT/[Formula: see text] is that the former enables the measurement of cognitive consciousness in those who have passed on, and in fictional characters; no such enablement is remotely possible for IIT/[Formula: see text]. For instance, we apply [Formula: see text] to measure the cognitive consciousness of: Descartes; and the first fictional detective to be described on Earth (by Edgar Allen Poe), Auguste Dupin. We also apply [Formula: see text] to compute the cognitive consciousness of an artificial agent able to make ethical decisions using the Doctrine of Double Effect.

Seeing the ‘excessively obvious’: The penny press, gender and work in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin stories

This article considers the biases of the popular press, the first mass-print medium, alongside the biases of gender and professionalism in Edgar Allan Poe’s early 1840s detective fiction. In the tales ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ and ‘The Purloined Letter’, detective C. Auguste Dupin develops unmatched analytical and professional capabilities through his extensive reading of print media and his familiarity with the protocols of the nineteenth-century penny press. Based on the model of the New York Sun, these cheap publications popularized women’s gruesome deaths and cruel misfortunes for profit. In Dupin’s media environment, women are always-already victims without the means or opportunity to speak for themselves, maintain steady employment, or find shelter from the exploitative practices of the commercial press. Men like Dupin, on the other hand, stand to build professional skills, wealth and fame the more they study and replicate the practices of their print media environment. Reading Poe’s representation of gender inequity as an extension of the penny press and middle-class professionalism complicates previous assessments of Dupin (by Marshall McLuhan and literary scholars alike) as an inclusive literary figure that invites reader participation.

The types of the chronotope in the short story «The Murders in the Rue Morgue» by Edgar Poe

The article is devoted to the analysis of the time and space peculiarities in the short story «The Murders in the Rue Morgue» by the American writer of the 19th century Edgar Allan Poe. The aim of the article is a analysis of artistic chronotope as a special way of influencing the reader and distinguishing the features of time and space in the analyzed work. E. Poe was the initiator of the «detective short story», the genre features of which are the description of the deduction of the character, the analysis of the event, generalized logical, mathematically accurate reasoning. The image of detective Auguste Dupin is the main in the short story. There are the real and historical chronotope in this detective short story. The author repeatedly focuses on spatial topos that form a unique authorial style. The character, through the perspective of the narrator's vision, is portrayed in detail, with the psychological factor closer to the finale intensifying, which allows to distinguish the features of personal chronotope. Real historical chronotope uses fictional topos or objects that represent a certain space that carry a symbolic load (the non-existent streets of Paris, the library, the room, etc.). The author skillfully combines real and fictional events to create a unique detective story. All topos are interconnected and complementary, leading to a deep understanding of artistic reality. Real, mystical, historical and social chronotopes are associated with deep psychology, which makes it possible to recreate events and find the right solution to solve the crime. The perspectives of the narrator and the short story's characters on the same event extend the boundaries of the chronotope, giving it additional features. This interconnection of chronotopes in the short story not only shapes the complex artistic world of the nineteenth century, but also makes it possible to refer the analyzed work to the literature of romanticism.

The Fall of the House of Musgrave

In Memories and Adventures, Conan Doyle recounted how his Edinburgh lecturer, Joseph Bell, provided the real-life model for Sherlock Holmes’s methods of reasoning: ‘It is no wonder that after the study of such a character I used and amplified his methods when in later life I tried to build up a scientific detective who solved cases on his own merits and not through the folly of the criminal.’ But Bell was not the only source for Holmes. His literary model was Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘masterful’ Parisian detective, Le Chavalier C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), and reappeared in ‘The Mystery of Marie Rogêt’ (1842) and ‘The Purloined Letter’ (1844). Poe was one of the most powerful literary influences on Doyle’s writing.

Dupin’s Descendants in Print and on Screen

Edgar Allan Poe envisions detection as competition, staging contests between characters, constructing plots so as to outwit readers, and in effect competing with himself in the two sequels to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” By striving to outdo what he has already done, Poe weaves authorial competition into the fabric of detection, inspiring a diverse range of writers to bring innovations to the form. He would likely be amazed to find that the descendants of Auguste Dupin have come in an array of shapes, sizes, nationalities, genders, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, subject positions, and ethnic and racial backgrounds. Moreover, even his vivid imagination could not have conceived of detection’s impact on various print and nonprint media in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including comic books, graphic novels, animation, computer games, television, and film.