Role of the City in Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue and Hoffmann’s Made

Role of the City in Poes Murders in the regret dead room and Hoffmanns Mademoiselle de ScuderyProfessors comment This student perceptively examines the role of the city as a setting and frame for detective fiction. Focusing on two early examples, Poes Murders in the Rue Morgue and Hoffmanns Mademoiselle de Scudery, both set in Paris, his sophisticated audition illuminates the cityness or framed constraint that renders the city a backdrop conducive to pipsuch as the citys crowded, constricted nature, promoting vertical earlier than kayoedward movement and increasing hostility and the fact that so much urban life occurs at night, a reversal of the natural order and facilitating unlawful activity. He compels us to look in new ways both at the city and at detective fiction. The Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevive in particular is same a bronze picture frame. It is the only frame suited to our story.... Honor de Balzac, Pre Goriot.1 Here like has been ensepulchered with like some monument s are heated more, some less And then he turned around and to his right we passed betwixt the torments and high walls. Dante, Inferno IX.2The city, writes St. Augustine, builds up a pilgrim community of every lyric .... with particular concern about differences of customs, laws, and institutions in which there is among the citizens a categorization of cohesion of human wills.3 Put simply the city is a sort of platform upon which a group of people joined together by their do of the same object work towards a common goal.4 What differentiates Augustines mental testing from other literary or theological treatments of the city is his attempt to carve out a vision of how the city operatesboth the internal qualities and external ... ...2 Dante, Inferno (New York Bantam, 1982) 83. 3 St. Augustine, The City of God (London Oxford UP, 1963) 348. 4 Robert Pinsky, Foreword, Inferno (New York Noonday, 1994) ix. 5 Edgar Allen Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold-Bug and Other Tale s (New York Dover, 1991) 33. All future references will appear in the text. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Oxford UP, 1989) 140. All future references will appear in the text. 7 Charles Baudelaire, The Moons Favors, Paris Spleen (New York New Directions, 1970) 79. 8 Hoffman, Mademoiselle de Scudery, Tales of Hoffman (New York Penguin, 1984) 17. All future references will appear in the text. 9 The limit is borrowed from linguistics, referring to the process by which the specific nature of a given sizeable in a particular word changes or assimilates the sound preceding it. Role of the City in Poes Murders in the Rue Morgue and Hoffmanns MadeRole of the City in Poes Murders in the Rue Morgue and Hoffmanns Mademoiselle de ScuderyProfessors comment This student perceptively examines the role of the city as a setting and frame for detective fiction. Focusing on two early examples, Poes Murders in the Rue Morgue and Hoffmanns Mademoiselle de Scudery, both set in P aris, his sophisticated essay illuminates the cityness or framed constraint that renders the city a backdrop conducive to murdersuch as the citys crowded, constricted nature, promoting vertical rather than outward movement and increasing hostility and the fact that so much urban life occurs at night, a reversal of the natural order and facilitating illicit activity. He compels us to look in new ways both at the city and at detective fiction. The Rue Neuve-Sainte-Genevive in particular is like a bronze picture frame. It is the only frame suited to our story.... Honor de Balzac, Pre Goriot.1 Here like has been ensepulchered with like some monuments are heated more, some less And then he turned around and to his right we passed between the torments and high walls. Dante, Inferno IX.2The city, writes St. Augustine, builds up a pilgrim community of every language .... with particular concern about differences of customs, laws, and institutions in which there is among the citizens a sort of coherence of human wills.3 Put simply the city is a sort of platform upon which a group of people joined together by their love of the same object work towards a common goal.4 What differentiates Augustines examination from other literary or theological treatments of the city is his attempt to carve out a vision of how the city operatesboth the internal qualities and external ... ...2 Dante, Inferno (New York Bantam, 1982) 83. 3 St. Augustine, The City of God (London Oxford UP, 1963) 348. 4 Robert Pinsky, Foreword, Inferno (New York Noonday, 1994) ix. 5 Edgar Allen Poe, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold-Bug and Other Tales (New York Dover, 1991) 33. All future references will appear in the text. 6 The Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford Oxford UP, 1989) 140. All future references will appear in the text. 7 Charles Baudelaire, The Moons Favors, Paris Spleen (New York New Directions, 1970) 79. 8 Hoffman, Mademoiselle de Scudery, Tales of Hoffman (New York Penguin, 1984) 17. A ll future references will appear in the text. 9 The term is borrowed from linguistics, referring to the process by which the specific nature of a given sound in a particular word changes or assimilates the sound preceding it.