A Deconstructive Reading of The Oval Portrait by Edgar Allan Poe

The objective of this research is to analyze “The Oval Portrait”, one of the shortest horror stories written and published by Edgar Allan Poe, 19th century American writer and poet, in 1862 through the lens of Deconstructive Criticism. One of the most important parts of this approach is to find the binary oppositions in the text and to explain how each side of these oppositions is privileged over the other one. Furthermore, the other aim of the research is to show how the text deconstructs itself. And finally, the last significant issue which is considered is the decentralization of the center in this text. In other words, since according to Derrida there is no fixed and determined center for any text, throughout this paper I intend to show how this statement is also correct for the abovementioned short story.

Keywords:

“Binary Opposition” , “Decentralization of the Center” , “Deconstruction” , “Deconstructive Criticism” , “Edgar Allan Poe” , “Jaques Derrida” , “Literary Criticism” , “The Oval Portrait”.