This text uses the writings of Edgar Allan Poe to pose a set of questions pertaining to literary genre, cultural modernity and technology. The author argues that Poe's cryptographic writings - his essays on cryptography and the short stories that grew out of them - requires that we rethink the relation of poststructural criticism to Poe's texts, and more generally, reconsider the relation of literature to communication. The author argues that cryptography serves not only as a template for the language, character, and themes of much of Poe's late fiction but also as a secret history of literary modernity itself.