Death and telling in Poe's "The Imp of the Perverse." - Edgar Allan Poe

Studies in Short Fiction, Spring, 1994 by Arthur A. Brown

We can only hope that the nothingness in which Poe's tale leave us is nothing more than the final word, that without a word we can leave Poe's tale, having someplace else to go - that from its endless existence as language we ourselves are "flung back into being."

Works Cited

Blanchot, Maurice. "Literature and the Right to Death." Trans. Lydia Davis. The Gaze of Orpheus. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Station Hill, 1981. 21 -62. Trans. of "Literature et le droit a la mort." La Part du feu. Editions Gallimard, 1949. "del-." "Indo-European Roots." The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 1970. Felman, Shoshana. "Henry James: Madness and the Risks of Practice (Turning the Screw of Interpretation)." Writing and Madness. Trans. Martha Noel Evans and Shoshana Felman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1985. 141-247. _____. "On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Approaches." Muller and Richardson 133-56. Lacan, Jacques. "Seminar on |The Purloined Letter.'" Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman. Muller and Richardson 28-54. Muller, John P., and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Pyschoanalytic Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988. Poe, Edgar Allan. "The Imp of the Perverse." Quinn 826-32. _____. "The Philosophy of Composition." Thompson 13-25. _____. "Preface, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque - 1840." Quinn 129-30. _____. "Review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, 1842." Thompson 569-77. _____. "Review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, 1847." Thompson 577-88. Quinn, Patrick F., ed. Poetry and Tales. By Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Library of American, 1984. Thompson, G. R., ed. Essays and Reviews. By Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Library of America, 1984.