Hoax literature: Reading Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain

This study seeks to provide a new critical appreciation of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain in particular, and a new thinking of literature more generally, through an elaboration of what I call "hoax literature." Bringing together the mischievous, duplicitous, strange aspects of literature with questions of the "real," what is true, "in the world," and the non-fictional, hoax literature becomes a way of conceiving what Maurice Blanchot characterizes as literature's contestatory power along with what Jacques Derrida refers to literature's "suspended relation to meaning and reference." The dissertation is especially indebted to Blanchot's little-discussed but powerful essay "The Great Hoax" (1957), with its emphasis on the inextricableness of experience from the insidiousness of an all-encompassing deception, as well as to Jacques Derrida's various readings of literature in terms of democracy, sovereignty, and the secret. There is a mischievousness in Poe, Melville, and Twain, I argue, that calls to be understood in terms of a logic of counter-hoax. Through readings of "The Angel of the Odd," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and other texts, I suggest that Poe was not only a "hoax" writer but also the first producer of hoax literature and first figure in American literature effectively to theorize a notion of "the great hoax" in literary works. This argument is deepened and refined through an extensive encounter with the writings of Melville, especially Typee, Moby-Dick, Pierre, "Benito Cereno," The Confidence-Man, and Billy Budd. I elaborate a Melvillean "poetics of the hoax," in order to analyze the singular ways in which figures of confidence and confiding, tricks and traps, deception, queerness, and an uneasy irony threaten to confound our sense of what is non-literary, real, true, historical. Finally, Mark Twain's work is read as at once a step back from the intricacies of Melville's writing and a perhaps unprecedentedly direct exposure of the "great hoax," particularly in terms of slavery and American nationalism. Attention is given to Twain's early journalistic hoaxes, "Mental Telegraphy," Pudd'nhead Wilson, "Those Extraordinary Twins," and "The Mysterious Stranger."...