Intertextuality, language, and rationality in the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and Paul Auster

This study examines the detective fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) and Paul Auster (1947- ), contending that looking at these two writers together brings out something in each that we might not be able to see if discussed separately. The study focuses on Poe's three famous detective stories: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1844), on the one hand, and on Auster's The New York Trilogy (1987), on the other. Auster's Trilogy is made up of three novels: City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986), and The Locked Room (1986). In these three novels in particular, Auster made frequent explicit and implicit references to Poe himself, to his works, and to his characters. Despite the fact that Poe and Auster wrote more than one hundred and fifty years apart, a close study of these works by the two writers will show that Auster makes use of some postmodern elements that Poe seems to be exhibiting long ago. These elements include the way they use intertextuality as a method for writing and reading detective works, the way they dramatize interpretation or make language into a "topic" to be discussed in the works themselves, and the way they critique rationality and pure reasoning in their works. The study analyzes these three elements in the detective works of both writers and argues that Poe can be read as someone who anticipated postmodernism in detective fiction in many crucial ways, and Auster as someone who wrote a new detective fiction that combines elements from both the classical and the postmodern genre.