SOURCE: Sweeney, Susan Elizabeth. “‘Subject-Cases’ and ‘Book-Cases’: Impostures and Forgeries from Poe to Auster.” In Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, edited by Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, pp. 247-69. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Sweeney discusses crime-mystery-detective short stories in which the protagonist is faced with his or her own double, contending that these stories address themes of identity crisis and the validity of the written text.

Supposing

… we suppose a case, and put ourselves into it, and hence are in two cases at the same time, and it is doubly difficult to get out.

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden (443)

To suppose, we suppose that there arose here and there that here and there there arose an instance of knowing …

—Gertrude Stein, “An Elucidation” (430)

What does it mean, in Thoreau's terms, to “suppose a case”? “To suppose,” as Stein...