Tijelo, prostor i osjeti u pripovijetci „Nevolja“ Edgara Allana Poea

This paper aims to examine the sensationalism of Blackwood’s Magazine as evident in Poe’s tale “A Predicament” and how Poe disengages from the tradition of Blackwoods. On the one hand, Poe conflates Psyche Zenobia’s adventure into a Gothic Cathedral with the Blackwood’s sensationalistic experience, which treats vehement sensations as the prime condition for stimulating the mind’s engagement with a spiritual vision of a world beyond the material world. On the other, Poe’s tale disengages itself from the tradition of Blackwood’s Magazine: Zenobia loses her sensations altogether in the quest for final knowledge and there is no return to her real life. This paper will further look at the mutilated/deformed body in Poe’s “A Predicament” as a body in pain, or without pain, through which the mind engages its imagination. It will also discuss how Poe, through Zenobia’s gaze and speculation upon a sublime cathedral, installs an aesthetic appreciation that distances an imaginary space from reality and facilitates self-mesmerism through which Zenobia is grounded in the earthly world, both physically and spiritually.Cilj je ovog rada analizirati prikaz senzacionalizma Blackwood’s Magazinea u pripovijetci „Nevolja” Edgara Allana Poea te Poeovo propitivanje tog senzacionalizma. Poe istovremeno isprepliće pustolovine Psyche Zenobije u Gotičkoj katedrali i Blackwood’s senzacionalističko iskustvo, koje snažne osjete smatra glavnim stimulirajućim uvjetom za interakciju uma sa spiritualnom vizijom svijeta izvan materijalnog svijeta, ali se i distancira od tradicije Blackwood’s Magazinea. Zenobia u potpunosti gubi svoje osjete u potrazi za ultimativnim znanjem te se ne može vratiti svom stvarnom životu. Rad se bavi i osakaćenim/deformiranim tijelom u Poeovoj pripovijetci kao tijelom koje osjeti, ili ne osjeti bol te tako omogućuje umu da se koristi imaginacijom. Naposljetku, rad pokazuje kako Poe, pomoću Zenobijina pogleda i razmišljanjima o uzvišenosti katedrale, promiče estetski doživljaj koji odvaja imaginaran prostor od stvarnosti te stvara samoopčinjenost koja smješta Zenobiju i fizički i spiritualno u zemaljski svijet

Olfactory Experiences and an Unknown Force in Patrick Süskind’s «Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders»

Patrick Süskind’s Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders presents a sort of Janus-figure, gazing backwards toward the primitive form of life (Grenouille’s Romantic deliverance) and forward toward an Enlightenment anthropocentric mechanism (an allusion to negative aesthetics) which reveals the formation and dissolution of political power through the olfactory experiences of the protagonist. In other words, it concerns the two worlds between which there is an unknown force transforming all olfactory manipulation/experimentation into nothingness: as men scheme their evil business through objects or scents, a greater force then deconstructs those schemes

The Dark Psyche of Self-Destruction in Poe’s Haunted House and Landscape

As J. O. Bailey notes, Poe held a “land of dreams in his mind.” Poe’s dark, mist-wreathed landscape resembles the gloomy atmosphere in his haunted architecture that confines human beings within a grotesque world. If this weird geography, his haunted house, is “a peculiarly personal land of dreams” (Bailey), then Poe reaches out for a psychological journey or dreams of humanity through an eerie nature, inter-crossing the weaker realm of humanity and the realm of Spiritual universe/sublimity (Dennis W. Eddings) or terminating in an abyss. This article will concentrate on Poe’s scheme of self-destruction in dreams and the psychological journey of the imp of the perverse. This perverse demon, possessing the power to de-materialize the outer stable state, is allegorized as a decayed house or a haunted landscape in the ambience of sadness where an ethereal character completes its self-destruction in a secluded place

The narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket: Psychological introspection in A Maritime Journey

This paper aims to disclose Pym’s epistemological and gnostic quest as the revelation of the psychological introspection of the author. I argue that Poe uses the arcane white shrouded figure as an apocalyptic power to paint a surreal realm that overlaps his spiritual realm discussed in Eureka. The shrouded figure is a self-reflection of Pym, or more accurately, of Poe himself. In the novel, nature engages in the process of decomposition or dissolution, by which Poe associates Gothic space with the theme of the elimination of the ego that reaches its peak when the shrouded figure appears. The three interrelated aspects of my analysis—the terrifying narrative of southwards adventure, a Hollow Earth as a Utopian / Dystopian world, and the geometric structure of the quincuncial network—all point in the same direction: Pym is a novel in which the writer / protagonist, through the narrative structure of God’s providential injunction, integrates his exploration of every imaginable form of spiritual survival and transcendence into spaces of horror on Earth that do not permit transcendence