The case of a twofold repetition: Edgar Allan Poe’s intertextual influence on Paul Auster’s "Ghosts"

Authors

  • María Laura Arce Álvarez Complutense University of Madrid

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.2822

Keywords:

Contemporary American literature, postmodern literature, intertextuality, comparative literature and theory of literature

Abstract

The aim of the following contribution is to analyze the intertextual relation between Paul Auster’s "Ghosts" (1986) and Edgar Allan Poe short story William Wilson (1839). This article studies different aspects that Paul Auster’s novel has as a reinterpretation and rewriting of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story. Auster creates an intertextual relation with Poe’s narration in order to introduce certain aspects of his fiction such as the issues of identity, the concept of the double and the construction of Auster’s theory of writing. In this sense, this proposal presents an interpretation of Auster’s "Ghosts" as an intertextual and postmodern reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Auster, P. 1982. The Invention of Solitude. London: Faber & Faber.

Auster, P. 1987. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber & Faber.

Andrews, C. 1997. “The Subject and the City: The Case of the Vanishing Private Eye in Paul Auster’s City of Glass”. Henry Street 6 (1): 61-72.

Brown, M. 2007. Paul Auster. Contemporary American and Canadian Novelists. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Coskren, R. 1975. “William Wilson’ and the Desintegration of the Self”. Studies in Short Fiction 12 (2): 155-163.

Freud, S. 2003. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Classics.

Herzogenrath, B. 1999. An Art of Desire. Reading Paul Auster. Amsterdan: Rodopi.

Holzapfel, A. M. 1996. The New York Trilogy: Whodunit? Berlin: Peter Lang.

Jung, Y. 2007. “Poe’s William Wilson”. Explicator 65 (2) 82-85.

Poe, E. A. 2003. The Fall of the House of Usher & Other Writings. London: Penguin Classics.

Russel, A. 1990. “Deconstructing The New York Trilogy: Paul Auster’s Anti-Detective Fiction”. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31 (2): 71-85.

Shiloh, I. 2002. Paul Auster and the Postmodern Quest: A Road to Nowhere. New York: Peter Lang.

Springer, C. 2001. Crises: The Works of Paul Auster. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Varvogli, A. 2001. The World that is the Book: Paul Auster’s Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Ware, T. 1989. “The Two Stories of ‘William Wilson”. Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1): 43-48.

Worton, M. and J. Still. 1993. Intertextuality: Theory and Practice. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Downloads

Published

20-12-2014

How to Cite

Arce Álvarez, M. L. (2014). The case of a twofold repetition: Edgar Allan Poe’s intertextual influence on Paul Auster’s "Ghosts". Journal of English Studies, 12, 35–48. https://doi.org/10.18172/jes.2822

Issue

Vol. 12 (2014)

Section

Articles

License

The authors retain copyright of articles and authorize Journal of English Studies the first publication. They are free to share, redistribute, and/or reprint the article without obtaining permission from the publisher as long as they give appropriate credit to the editor and the journal.

Self-archiving is allowed too. In fact, it is recommendable to deposit a PDF version of the paper in academic and/or institutional repositories.

It is recommended to include the DOI number.

This journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License