Edgar Poe's Eureka

I'm excited to share (okay, a little self-promotion) that my publication in the Fall 2008 issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review is now available online at The EAP site. The essay started as a class paper and evolved into the article after a tremendous amount of hard work. What I didn't know at the time was how Poe's Eureka would overlap with my dissertation topic. Mostly, it's the circular reasoning aspect of Poe's prose-poem, but also the related paradoxes and the encountering of the sublime. Anatomy has these things.

Here's an excerpt:

In Eureka, Poe’s narrator reads, “We will come at once to a proposition which he [John Stuart Mill] regards as the acme of the unquestionable -- as the quintessence of axiomatic undeniability. Here it is: -- 'Contradictions cannot both be true -- that is, cannot coexist in nature.’” In other words, Poe implicitly argues that contradictions are the essence of truth in a near-celebration of circular reasoning. Poe sees beauty in contra-diction, in speaking against, revealing his belief in the religious unification of aesthetics and science. The satire of “Aries Tottle” questions Aristotle’s statements about God and the universe; the “real” Aristotle felt that the universe had very little “direct bearing on any belief in the existence of god” and was “non-committal” about it. But Poe is anything but non-committal. He depends on Greek/Ptolemaic cosmology, which had been modified in medieval philosophy to be “compatible” with Judaic and Christian theology. Poe views this division as in need of reconciliation, and Eureka is his attempt at such reunification.

Many of those things apply to the anatomy--unification of aesthetics and science, use of satire, and contradiction.