Foretelling darwinism, revising race: Poe's scientific discourse in "The murders in the rue Morgue"

Having recently celebrated the bicentenary of Edgar Allan Poe’s birth, his tales still remain an invaluable source of ongoing interpretation. The first tale that conforms his detective trilogy, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, has been analysed from multiple perpectives, especially taking into consideration the discourse of race as a main focus of attention. Nonetheless, detective Auguste Dupin’s references to Georges Cuvier, an important preDarwinian French naturalist and zoologist, have often been unnoticed. This article aims at identifying pre-Darwinian concepts about selection and evolution in Poe’s tale so as to facilitate readings of the tale in relation to Darwinism and evolutionary theories

Les enjeux sémiotiques de la perception dans L’Étranger d’Albert Camus

Considered as a romantic incarnation of author’s ideas, L’Etranger put us in front of the absurd through the problematic character of Meursault, often studied and commented as subject of this philosophical attitude. The absurd presupposes a relationship between man and the world and is thus inevitably linked to perception: a sensory experience then founds the discourse of the novel, establishing Meursault as percipient/enunciator subject. We will use the resources offered by semiotics of discourse in its phenomenological version for analyzing the perceptual path of Meursault and especially to consider the question of Camus’s absurd under a new light