pynchon-l-digest V2 #9465

[alice wellintown]

That Poe story is, of course, The Murders in Rue Morgue.

Here is a fine essay on Poe and these questions:

How the Nineteenth Century Influenced Poe and How Poe Influenced the
Development of Detective Fiction and Mysteries.
an excerpt:

Poe’s greatest mark upon the literary world was his invention of the
detective story “with all its major conventions complete” (Baym 1483).
Poe actually wrote three detective stories. The first was The Murders
in Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, and The Purloined Letter.
In creating these stories, Poe was responding to the ongoing
scientific debate about the “origins and meaning of the universe”
(Frank 170). In the opening of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Poe
spends a great deal of time on the nature of reason and analysis. He
takes care to distinguish between calculation, analysis and intuition.
Intuition, in and of itself, is not credited but is put forth as what
truly exceptional analysis looks like (Poe 4: 1). Dupin’s conclusions
may seem preternatural, but his method at arriving at them is solidly
grounded in observation and logic.

Linked here and in the works cited.

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~wdlloyd/poesample.htm


On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 7:16 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Re: The Pierce-Pynchon-Descartes method
>>
>> My favourite read against method is not Feyerabend but Eco/Sebeok: The Sign
>> of Three:  Dupin, Holmes,Pierce.
>
>
> Thank you. I don't want to make too much of that famous phrase from
> GR, "No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive
> knotting into...", but, since Pynchon, after what might be called his
> post-Adams years, that is, after the Slow Learner Stories excepting
> the "The Secret Integration", so Oedipa's story, we notice that P has
> changed in a major way, and, dare I say, he maintains this through the
> rest of his writing. The Critical Industry focused on the apparent
> postmodernism of this shift, so McHale, for example, notes that P has
> undermined the modernist reading of postmodernist texts, and so on,
> and I've no argument with these readings and find them fascinating and
> useful, but only want to suggest that Pynchon fits quite snugly into
> the American Tradition and this includes Poe and James. Like Poe P
> argues against the method of Holmes (Poe does this explicitly in one
> of the tales, forgotten which one), and James.