Narration and Reflection: The Search for Grounds in Poe's "The Power of Words" and "The Domain of Arnheim"

TLDR: Poe as mentioned in this paper argues that self-reflection as an attempt to establish certainty in the unmediated relationship of the self to itself is the foundation of modern metaphysics as a metaphysics of subjectivity.

Abstract: Self-reflection as an attempt to establish certainty in the unmediated relationship of the self to itself is the foundation of \"modern metaphysics as a metaphysics of subjectivity.\"1 Poe's tales belong to this post-Cartesian metaphysics of subjectivity which searches for the foundations or grounds of moral and epistemological certainty in itself. In tales like \"The Domain of Arnheim\" and \"The Power ofWords\" Poe both participates in and subverts the grounding of thought in subjectivity. In these tales Poe explores the problem of reflection and finds the act of narration to be essential to it. In Poe, the necessity of narration reveals the incoherence and the indispensability of attempts to ground certainty in an unmediated relationship of self to self. In Poe, the foundation of moral philosophy in the analysis of subjectivity appears cracked. An imp of the perverse, a principle of conflict within the self, ungrounds speculation. Reflection in Poe's tales usually involves an irreducible alterity that constitutes the subject. Stories like \"William Wilson,\" \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" and the tales of ratiocination, enact the conflicts of consciousness most obviously. But in the tales that focus on language and aesthetics, which the philosophy of reflection in Poe's era especially valued, the ineluctable link between self-reflection and self-antagonism—the flaw Poe finds in the foundation of moral philosophy—appears most clearly. In this connection,