The key to an understanding of what Poe attempted to accomplish with his art lies in his depictions of order and disorder in the universe. Poe's explorations of order and disorder revolve around journey and abyss motifs exemplified in his imaginative approaches toward nature, conscience, art, intuition, and apocalypse. These imaginative approaches serve to unify Poe's- work as a whole and emphasize his importance as a questing artist who not only sought to define the shape of reality in terms of stability and chaos but also sought to formulate a final metaphysical ordering of chaos and finitude.

Although one of the best-known cases of intercultural literary partnership, Charles Baudelaire's translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works have been little analysed with a methodology appropriate to Translation Studies. Relying on a functionally target-oriented approach to translation and an empirical methodology, the present thesis undertakes this analysis. Positioning the prospective function(s) of the translations as intended by the translator within their historical context, Chapter One explores the para-discourse of the translator and its contemporary reception. Beyond the Romantic critical tradition of the whole project, Baudelaire's introductory writings on Poe appear to target in a propagandist way the literary elite of the time. On the contrary, the selection and organization of the five volumes of translations for publication suggest primarily a popularising strategy intended to capture, through the fictional genre, the attention of the growing mass audience of the Second Empire. In Chapters Two and Three, traditional appraisals of the translations in terms of quality assessment are questioned in favour of an explanation of interpretative frameworks and translation strategies as seen through the analyses of two translated tales and of textual variables throughout the corpus. Baudelaire's biographical interpretation of the narrative voice combines with clear strategies to normalize the stylistic authority of the texts and to increase their dramatic and expressive impact, offering in the end a less rhetorical, but aesthetically more Romantic and narratively more Realist reading of Poe's fantastic tales. Baudelaire would thus have managed to reconcile at a textual level the ambiguities of his para-discourse in terms of targeted readership as seen in Chapter One. It is finally argued that beyond the constraints of the receiving system and the strategies of the translator to accommodate these, the French image of Poe as produced by Baudelaire owes much to a French resistance to the narrative ambiguity and style that Poe's writing represents. Confirming or challenging existing criticism on the Poe-Baudelaire case, the present thesis thus hopes to contribute, not only to our relatively limited knowledge of mid-nineteenth-century French translation, but also to our understanding of French short fiction and its conflicting stakes in terms of aesthetics and readership.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 246-250). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

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Transcending the boundaries of literature, the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Stanislaw Lem contribute to a dialogue between literary, philosophical, and scientific cultures. A critical approach to these writers that ignores the epistemic dimension in their works opens itself to the charge of misunderstanding their artistic goals and aspirations. In my dissertation I thus define, justify, and conduct an interdisciplinary study of Poe and Lem's works. / My project is underwritten by the epistemological assumption that literary works, and notably works of fiction, can make a contribution to knowledge that can be assessed in terms of interdisciplinary criteria. In the first chapter, where I discuss literature and knowledge within the interdisciplinary context, I examine various epistemological arguments in light of my central assertion. Next I examine the concepts involved in the discussion of literary works. Following the pragmatic re-orientation in literary and philosophical aesthetics, many fundamental concepts we take for granted--artworks, fictions, and texts among them--require exact re-examination and definition. Consequently, in Chapters Two and Three I review and refine the recent theories concerning the nature of works of art, the specificity of literary fictions, and the problem of literary interpretations. / My subsequent discussion of Poe and Lem is built on the theoretical base of (literary) epistemology and analytical aesthetics. I study Poe and Lem's literary fictions and theoretical essays, and the contributions they make to various fields of inquiry. In the process I critique, and sometimes refine, the explicit and implicit hypotheses articulated in their works. Specifically In Chapters Four and Five I discuss strategic and game theoretic models in the interpretation of fiction, including the concepts of communication and rationality. In Chapter Six, completing the epistemological circle inaugurated in Chapter One, I discuss the epistemological and cosmological theories proposed in Poe's "Eureka".

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Tulsa, 1989. / Bibliography: leaves 283-300.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Literature, December 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 544-569). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 254-260).