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The idea of going public with the private would appear to gesture towards psychoanalysis; however, the roots of this gesture are to be found in Poe's reworking of the Kantian sublime. This is, I would argue, an unconscious echo in Poe's writings. Poe inherits a philosophical language which reveals his indebtedness to Kant, and Poe unknowingly looks back to Kant and forward to Freud.¹ Many of Poe's tales appear, on the surface, to be explorations of complex psychological disturbances. However, there is more to them than this: there is also a problematic attempt to situate the individual within the collective through an exploration of urban experience. Such an attempt forces Poe's characters into public, urban domains; ones in which the encounter between the subject and society becomes the site of disorientation, but also, crucially, analytical thought. To illustrate this we will look at a range of Poe's detective tales. When discussing these tales my emphasis is on the accounts of reasoning which each tale constructs rather than on their respective plots. This is because it is in Dupin's theorising, rather than in his actions, that we can see neo-Kantian ideas at work. What we will see is that Poe reconfigures the sublime in order to create specifically urban mysteries: mysteries which will require an analytical explanation.²

DOI: 10.1057/9780230598706_6

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