Literary Studies and Literary Pragmatics: The Case of "The Purloined Letter"

Abstract

The New Interdisciplinarity Many conceptual and methodological changes have swept the social sciences in the last decades. As a result of this paradigm shift, it is hardly possible now to proceed in the social sciences without some form of mathematical analysis and/or empirical research. The emergence of new research disciplines like neuro-linguistics, artificial intelligence, or psycho-physics also points to a growing interdisciplinary confidence in the study of human affairs. Although most progress has been confined to domains where the stochastic nature of processes involved offers a known way of quantifying their results, important steps have also been made elsewhere. In this brave new age, even such elusive concepts as using your ace serve in a game of tennis are tackled by mathematics-specifically, by game theory. On a more serious note, game theoretic analysis has also led John Banzhaf's successful court challenge of the weighted voting system used by Nassau County, New York, and a wholesale revision of the seat allocation process in the US House of Representatives.1 In contrast, literary scholarship, left on the sidelines of these new developments, seems largely quaint and anachronistic, despite libraries of professional publications on theory and methodology. Literary critics have, of course, staged several groundbreaking forays into such domains as linguistics, structuralism, semiotics, statistics, and even information theory, in search of more rigorous analytic tools. Sadly, these superficial alliances with more established and rigorous disciplines have failed to produce much of substance. As Richard Levin points out in "The New Interdisciplinarity in Literary Criticism" (1993), the interdisciplinary exchange is, as a rule, restricted to the appropriation of a few central metaphors that flourish indiscriminately in the critical discourse. Little effort goes into the adaptation of the methods that made these metaphors so successful in their

The five games of Mr Edgar Allan Poe: A study of strategic thought in ‘The Purloined Letter’

“…It is usually assumed that the events of the story themselves derive from the theory as laid out by Dupin, and often Poe is criticised for the limitations of his strategic analysis (e.g. Davis, 1970; Deloche and Oguer, 2006; Swirski, 1996). But while the games explicitly described in ‘The Purloined Letter’ alert us to the relevance of strategic thinking in general, they do not explain the specific thinking within the tale.…”

“…Swirski (1996), used ‘The Purloined Letter’ as a jumping off point to provide a valuable account of the relevance of game theory to literary studies. Similar to my approach, Swirski analyses ‘The Purloined Letter’, at least in part, in terms of the games played by the actors and not merely the games described by Poe.…”

“…Brams (1994), following on from Davis (1970), argued that Poe (and later Conan Doyle), ‘sidestepped the Minimax theorem’. He suggests that they may have done this to produce ‘better fiction’, but he does not recognise, as discussed in this paper, that mixed strategies are irrelevant to the game between the Minister and the Prefect/Dupin because the Prefect and Dupin are able to apply both strategies. Swirski (1996), used ‘The Purloined Letter’ as a jumping off point to provide a valuable account of the relevance of game theory to literary studies. Similar to my approach, Swirski analyses ‘The Purloined Letter’, at least in part, in terms of the games played by the actors and not merely the games described by Poe.…”

“…The tale is also one of the central texts used to discuss how literature and game theory can mutually support one another (e.g. Brams, 1994Brams, , 2011Swirski, 1996) -with Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Final Problem' being its only serious rival (e.g. Perea, 2014;Wainwright, 2012).…”