Revisiting Uncertainty: A Lyotardian Philosophical Reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s Selected Short Stories

Unavoidably wrought by the socio-historical context in which they occur, literary notions change in the course of history and ‘uncertainty’ is not an exception. Critically reading Edgar Allan Poe’s selected short stories, this study aims at bringing about a better realization of the aforementioned concepts in the light of Lyotardian philosophy to provide a new dimension in reading Poe’s short stories. Edgar Allan Poe, the American writer and literary critic, died in ۱۸۴۹ while he probably had no notion of the postmodern paradigm and Lyotard’s postmodern perspectives. Poe, obviously, could not have been looking at the literary world like the postmodern critics of the ۲۱stcentury, but there exist some elements in his fictions that look alluring to a postmodern philosopher like Lyotard. Since there are heterogeneity of language games through which we pass, the artists make moves within those language games—that disrupt and open those language games to what will have been, that is, they open up new ways of thinking that are unpresentable in current language games which Lyotard develops in the postmodern condition and narrative knowledge. Poe moves toward this unpresentable to open up a new path in transgressing condition. Although Poe belonged to, almost, two centuries ago, the aim is to find out how Poe had used similar conception of ‘uncertainty’ close to Lyotard’s in his selected fictions and how they occur in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”.