Atmospheric Narrative Landscape, Stimmung and Place-Making in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Silence—A Fable”
摘要
In the present article, we propose a new term, atmospheric narrative landscape, which attempts to transcend the mere organisation of spatial objects with an already established symbolic value, reducing spatial experience to formal semantics. In contrast, our definition of this term aims to show that narrativity is accomplished by systematically organising the stimuli arising from the individual spatial elements into original and bold relational configurations and orchestrations. By using a set of metaphorical semantic devices, or meaning-making mechanisms, an intensive field of atmosphere is created that leads to a holistic, lived experience of sense, generating and producing Stimmung (mood). We will approach the object of investigation through: (1) A theoretical exposition of the term atmospheric narrative landscape in relation to the concepts of Stimmung and place-making; (2) An analysis of the imagined and paradoxical literary landscape designed by Edgar Allan Poe in his text Silence—a Fable (1838). Poe’s fiction will help us highlight, explore, and reveal a place-making semantic apparatus for producing deviant, weird, and unreal landscapes through sensory stimuli that are constructed around the conceptual centre of the idea of the eerie.