The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet

Rosenheim, Shawn James

Brossura

ISBN 10: 080185332X ISBN 13: 9780801853326

Casa editrice: Johns Hopkins Univ Pr, 1996

This text uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity and technology. The author argues that Poe's cryptographic writings - his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them - requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts, and more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. The author argues that cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself.

Recensione:

""A masterful and imaginative work which is truly Poe-like in its fascination with cryptography, ciphers, and codes. Poe takes his place as the first postmodern thinker, a precursor of such figures as Pynchon, Borges, and William Gibson." -- Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time

L'autore:

Shawn Rosenheim is associate professor of English and American Studies at Williams College.