The Cryptographic Imagination Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet / Shawn James Rosenheim.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Rosenheim, Shawn, author.

Series:

Parallax (Baltimore, Md.)

Parallax

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Influence.

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849--Cryptography.

Cold War (1945-1989).

World War (1939-1945).

Modernism (Literature).

Internet.

Influence (Literary, artistic, etc.).

Detective and mystery stories, American.

Cryptography in literature.

Cryptography.

Ciphers in literature.

American literature.

Cold War.

World War, 1939-1945--Cryptography.

World War, 1939-1945.

Modernism (Literature)--United States.

American literature--History and criticism.

Detective and mystery stories, American--History and criticism.

United States.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 online resource (ix, 264 pages) :) illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Johns Hopkins University Press

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Originally published in 1996. In The Cryptographic Imagination, Shawn Rosenheim uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity, and technology. Rosenheim argues that Poe's cryptographic writing — his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them — requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts and, more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. Cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction (including his creation, the detective story) but also as a "secret history" of literary modernity itself. "Both postwar fiction and literary criticism," the author writes, "are deeply indebted to the rise of cryptography in World War II." Still more surprising, in Rosenheim's view, Poe is not merely a source for such literary instances of cryptography as the codes in Conan Doyle's "The Dancing-Men" or in Jules Verne, but, through his effect on real cryptographers, Poe's writing influenced the outcome of World War II and the development of the Cold War. However unlikely such ideas sound, The Cryptographic Imagination offers compelling evidence that Poe's cryptographic writing clarifies one important avenue by which the twentieth century called itself into being. "The strength of Rosenheim's work extends to a revisionistic understanding of the entirety of literary history (as a repression of cryptography) and then, in a breathtaking shift of register, interlinks Poe's exercises in cryptography with the hyperreality of the CIA, the Cold War, and the Internet. What enables this extensive range of applications is the stipulated tension Rosenheim discerns in the relationship between the forms of the literary imagination and the condition of its mode of production. Cryptography, in this account, names the technology of literary production—the diacritical relationship between decoding and encoding—that the literary imagination dissimulates as hieroglyphics—the hermeneutic relationship between a sign and its content."—Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College

Contents:

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Genres

1. The King of Secret Readers

2. Secret Writing as Alchemy: Recoding Defoe

3. Detective Fiction and the Analytic Sublime

4. Dark Fiber: Cryptography, Telegraphy, Science Fiction

Effects

5. Resurrexi: Poe in the Crypt of Lizzie Doten

6. Deciphering the Cold War: Toward a Literary History of Espionage

7. Ciphering the Net

Coda: Strange Loops and Talking Birds

Appendix: Public-Key Cryptography

Notes

Glossary

Index.

Notes:

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License

Open access edition supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Originally published as Johns Hopkins Press in 1997

Includes bibliographical references (pages 213-251) and index.

Description based on print version record.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

0-8018-5331-1

OCLC:

1137746433