Poe’s Tales of Ratiocination - A Closer Look

Seminar paper from the year 2009 in the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,0, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: In this paper the author analyzes two of Poe’s detective stories: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter. The focus will be on an analysis concerning the ratiocination - the way of deductive and inductive reasoning - performed by Dupin, the protagonist detective. Furthermore, the author would like to present the question of whether Dupin really arrives at his conclusions by mere ratiocination and the process of reasoning or whether there are other things involved. Before the author delves into this problem though, she would like to present a short history of the crime story with Poe as the inventor of the detective story in the center. After that follows a short description and demonstration of the characteristics of Poe’s detective stories as well as a characterization of the protagonist, detective Dupin. Before she concludes the paper, she compares the Dupin stories to modern detective fiction that can be found in television programming.