Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination,
Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set
of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and
technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing-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. Cryptography serves not
only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much
of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story)
but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both
postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are
deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still
more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source
for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan
Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his
effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome
of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However
unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers
compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one
important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into
being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic
understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression
of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register,
interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of
the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this
extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim
discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary
imagination and the condition of its mode of production.
Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary
production-the diacritical relationship between decoding and
encoding-that the literary imagination dissimulates as
hieroglyphics-the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its
content."-Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College
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