Effets de réel, effets de fiction dans Arthur Gordon Pym d’Edgar Allan Poe

• Published in: Revue Française d'Etudes Américaines
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: French
• Published: PERSEE 1998
• Subjects: Antarctic; South Pole; The Antarctic; Antarc*; South pole
• Online Access: http://www.persee.fr/doc/rfea_0397-7870_1998_num_76_1_1727; https://doi.org/10.3406/rfea.1998.1727

With The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, published within months of the actual discovery of the Antarctic continent, Poe wrote the obviously fictitious tale of a voyage of exploration to the South Pole but carefully disguised his artistic enterprise "under the garb " of a scientific and realistic account. The text thus exhibits what may be called "referential markers" intertwined with their rhetorical counterpart, "fictional markers" highlighting its literary nature. The two series of apparently contradictory signs constantly intersect without ever cancelling each other and generate the final whiteness, a representation, perhaps, of the writer's annihilation into his own creation.