| dc.description.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. | en_US |
