Flight into Fancy: Poe's Discovery of the Right Brain
2001; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/slj.2001.0001
ISSN1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Cognitive Science and Education Research
Resumo"Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1836 review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology. "It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding. It has assumed the majesty of science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings" (Essays and Reviews 329). Poe, of course, counted himself among these "thinking beings" and continued to be engaged by phrenology, which located various "faculties" such as "amativeness" and "cautiousness" in different parts of the brain. In a letter written in 1841, for example, Poe says that his head "has been examined by several phrenologists" (Thomas 345). Indeed, Poe's interest in phrenology was probably behind his discussion of the mind in his critical writing and detective fiction. In "The Poetic Principle" he divides the mind into "the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense" (Essays and Reviews 272), and the narrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" speaks of "the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul" and of "a double Dupin--the creative and the resolvent" (Poetry and Tales 402).
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