The Cryptographic Imagination by Shawn James Rosenheim

The Cryptographic Imagination by Shawn James Rosenheim

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

A masterful and imaginative work which is truly Poe-like in its fascination with cryptography, ciphers, and codesPoe takes his place as the first postmodern thinker, a precursor of such figures as Pynchon, Borges, and William Gibson.
—Errol Morris, director of The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time

Shawn Rosenheim is associate professor of English and American Studies at Williams College.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781421437156
ISBN 10	1421437155
Title	The Cryptographic Imagination
Author	Shawn James Rosenheim
Series	Parallax: Re-Visions Of Culture And Society
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Johns Hopkins University Press
Year published	2020-05-19
Number of pages	282
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.