Intertextuality,Spectrality,Singularity:The Indeterminacy Of Poe’s Detective Stories

Edgar Allan Poe was an American romantic poet,short story writer,and literary critic in the 19 th century.His style is different from the mainstream writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman’s enthusiasm and optimism,but focuses on exposing the dark side of human consciousness,rendering the atmosphere of death and terror,and emphasizing the performance of literary skills and artistic effects.In addition,Allan Poe is widely regarded as the father of detective stories.He throws his quirky style into detective stories and combines logic with interest to turn the detective stories into an indeterminate game of words.At present,studies on Allan Poe at home and abroad mainly focus on his horror stories or poetics,rather than the significance of Allan Poe’s detective novels in the new era.Therefore,this thesis attempts to use the “indeterminacy” theory of Derrida’s deconstructionism as the main perspective,and Allan Poe ‘s “The Purloined Letter”,“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”,“The Mystery of Marie Roget” three detective stories as the research object,in order to interpret the indeterminacy and postmodern elements of Allan Poe’s detective stories,and to better understand the literary significance of Allan Poe’s detective stories,exploring its significance and value to the real world and the literature of the new era.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction,main body,and conclusion.The introduction mainly includes literature review,methodology,and research questions.The main body is divided into three chapters.The first chapter focuses on the text and explores the representation of the indeterminate intertextuality in Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”.In a broad sense,the meaning of words reflected in the text is constantly expanded and rewritten.In a narrow sense,it is reflected in the intertextuality of the concepts of “letter” and “authority”.The indeterminate intertextuality of these texts paved the way for Allan Poe to break authority.The second chapter focuses on the author’s spectrality and the absence and presence of the detective in “The Murder of the Rue Morgue”.By analyzing the change of the detective image in the history of literature and the streams of metaphor in the story,this thesis further explores the dissolution of the author’s authority in Allan Poe’s detective stories,laying a foundation for readers’ participation.The third chapter focuses on the reader in “The Mystery of Marie Roget”,explaining that after the author’s authority is weakened,the independent reader becomes a part of the story as a singular supplementarity.This chapter also focuses on the substitute of the newspaper as the other and the singularity of the reader,as well as the reader’s transcendence and dissemination of the ego,and discusses how the detective story further breaks through the restriction of binary opposition,and finally reflects the characteristics of postmodernism and the needs of readers.On the basis of the argumentation,this thesis finally draws the conclusion that indeterminacy is the key point that Allan Poe reached in the process of exploring the new creation mode of detective stories.This is exactly in line with the development tendency of deconstructionism in the new era,which makes Poe’s detective stories have the characteristics of postmodernism.By endowing certain texts with intertextuality,present authors with spectrality,and identical readers with singularity,Allan Poe uses detective stories to bridge the gap between traditional literature and the new literature,providing a new idea for the problem of literary trend and literary transformation in the new era.