A Chapter of Suggestions, Fifty Suggestions, Marginalia e Marginal Notes: fractais das teorias estéticas de Poe?

Abstract

Criticism on Edgar Allan Poe’s works seems to have relegated A Chapter of Suggestions, Fifty Suggestions, Marginalia and Marginal Notes to a position of minor interest and importance within the corpus of artistic and critical production of the author. However, those works may be considered true fractals, under the perspectives of Quantum Physics and Chaos Theory, for they recurrently embrace the core of Poe’s critical and aesthetic theories in quite a fragmentary or fractalized way. This paper, therefore, aims at reading such works to analyze Poe’s use of textual and thematic fragmentation, a phenomenon equally present in his tales and poems, but perhaps less studied by critics, a fact which probably marks the contemporaneity of his production and aesthetic thought, and, at the same time, distances him from the 19th century North-American literary canon.