Arabescos sonoros e meandros narrativos em Edgar Allan Poe: o duplo como princípio de composição

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe s literary system exhibits a reverberation of all its constitutive elements. In order to investigate his creational process, we will consider four basic levels. On a first level, there is the writer, both a novelist and a poet. On a second level, there is the literary work: Poe brings narrative aspects to poems and poetical elements to short stories; he also develops in literary form principles defended in his essays. On a third level, there is the text: imagery, sounds, punctuation and words belonging to the same semantic field act together to produce a powerful effect. At last, there is the word, or, more precisely, the phoneme and the metrical foot. It is our understanding that textual elements act as doubles of a literary content, projecting on an external dimension intense internal sensations that, otherwise, would not be expressible. Our objective, therefore, is to analyze the construction of a unity of effect, central to Poe s literary system. In this process, we will pay particular attention to the sound: even though its importance is unquestionable in the composition of poems, its value in narrative structure tends to be overlooked. For that reason, one of our main intentions is to investigate in what way the phonemic contexture, and even the oral actions involved in the articulation of sounds, interact with textual descriptions to create a unity of impression