Konstrukcja przestrzeni i jej rola w kreacji podmiotu opowiadania Studnia i wahadło Edgara Allana Poego

Abstract

The article aims to show the relationship between the construction of space in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum and the creation of the story’s protagonist – a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who suffers elaborate torture. Relying on geopoetics and the concept of focalization as understood by Mieke Bal and Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, the author analyzes the impact of space on the senses and emotions of the subject in a situation of sensory deprivation. She also addresses various themes, important in Poe’s work and evident in the story, such as teraphobia, gothicism and the ideas of Enlightenment. In the course of the analysis, she argues that the way the prisoner experiences and describes the space of the prison cell becomes the focal point for the construction of the literary subject in this short story.