Eureka di Edgar Allan Poe: letteratura o scienza?

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse Edgar Allan Poe’s last work, Eureka, written and published in 1848 with the subtitle A Prose Poem, but then republished with another subtitle, An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe. The interest in Poe’s work has arisen from the difficulty to place it in a precise genre, considering that many scholars agree on the fact that it belongs to the scientific genre, while others have no doubt in fitting it in the realm of literature because of some parts which are regarded as obscure, ironic/satirical and rich in connotation and wordplays. Taking into account some of the most important contributions to Discourse Analysis – such as de Beaugrande, Dressler; Leech, Short; Black; Stubbs; Cook; Coulthard; Widdowson; Hoey; Halliday, Hasan among others – this work intends to investigate Poe’s use of language in Eureka in order to try to include it in either the literary or the scientific discourse, which usually display substantial differences at many levels of analysis, whether lexical, semantic, stylistic or pragmatic.