In this panel, three scholars (one graduate student, one associate professor, and one full professor) will offer 20-minute presentations that approach the topic of Poe and games. We will reserve the remaining 15 minutes for a question-and-answer session with the audience. The presentations are as follows:
Zahra Moosavi: “Playing the System: Game Theory, Deception, and Meta-Strategy in ‘The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether’” argues that Poe’s story is more than a darkly comic tale of mistaken identity. It is a carefully structured game of deception, played both within the story and between Poe, his narrator, and the reader. This presentation uses game theory to analyze the story on two levels: first, as a contest of asymmetric information within the asylum, and second, as a meta-game in which Poe manipulates reader expectations through narrative misdirection.
Robert Tally: “A Game of Puzzles Played Upon a Map: Poe’s Agonistic Literary Criticism” claims that having successfully secured the purloined letter, C. Auguste Dupin explains his reasoning by reference to “a game of puzzles, [...] which is played upon a map. One party playing requires another to find a given word—the name of town, river, state or empire—any word, in short, upon the motley and perplexed surface of the chart.” Dupin’s point, of course, is that the most obvious name will be least likely to be discovered, and by extension, the “letter” was best hidden in plain sight. Poe’s tale is thus seen more generally as a critique of deep interpretation in favor of surface reading, but the “gaming” aspect of this is less appreciated. The point is not to “read,” but to “win,” as Dupin’s triumphant finale to the tale also makes clear. The text to be read, one might say, is not the ostensible document but the opponent. Poe’s arguably agonistic approach to literary criticism is part of this. He imagines the roles of the writers and readers as game-players, and the interpretive act can thus be imagined as a tactic or maneuver in a contest. Beginning with Dupin’s “game,” this presentation examines several of Poe’s tales in which “games” of interpretation take place.
Stephen Rachman: “Poe and the Cryptographic Moment: A Look Back. A Look Forward” returns to a moment in the late 1980s through to 2000 that saw the decoding of two unsolved cyphers connected with Edgar Allan Poe—one simultaneously by Poe scholars Terence Whalen and John Hodgson and the other by a software engineer Gil Broza—and the appearance of Shawn Rosenheim’s Cryptographic Imagination, and my own search for W.B. Tyler. Since that moment, when the notion that Poe’s cryptographic game seemed like possibly one of his hoaxes, it was gradually revealed to be something other, an engagement with triviality. As critical opinion began to coalesce around the conclusion that these were not secret Poe texts, it also appeared that the texts were not particularly interesting. After the flourishing of interest in Poe’s cryptography, however, our world has grown increasingly dependent on all forms of encryption, both for fun and for serious enterprises. The banal and the seriously mysterious are necessarily entwined. In the cryptographic moment that this presentation discusses, literary scholars had been hoping to find the face of Poe, but they found, I suggest, the half-hidden face of W.B. Tyler. Where literary scholars had hoped to discover in cryptography the egotistical sublime of Poe’s hoaxing imagination, they found, instead, the astonishing odds-beating possibility of mass culture, and the statistical sublime.