IDEALISM VERSUS REALITY IN THE MIND OF A VISIONARY
IDEALISM VERSUS REALITY IN THE MIND OF A VISIONARY

Summary/Abstract: “Idealism versus Reality Traces in the Mind of a Visionary” evidences Edgar Allan Poe‟s framework of Platonic idealism charged with Freudian images and the process of looking at things through the half-closed eye – the main idea of Poe‟s aesthetics and epistemology. The opposition is made between the directness of rational mind/science and the indirectness of imagination/poetry by using the force of imaginative writing to disrupt the mind‟s capacity to make judgments about reality. Poe‟s method of attracting the reader‟s attention through various techniques (the introduction of an incomplete solved mystery, the appearance of an incompletely exposed face or an enclosed space that never fully closes) constructs mental and physical interior states that question every perceptual limitation and expand new imaginative horizons.

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