Allegory Plays

Introduction to "Staging Allegory," an essay cluster in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900

Funeral of the Acrobat (“Cambazın Cenazesi”) written by Firuze Engin, directed by Berfin Zenderlioğlu as a production of IkinciKat theatre in Istanbul is a new breath in Turkey’s theatre field; but beyond its local importance, it is a very important rebellion against the Anglocentric current of the contemporary world. The theatricality of this play paradigmatically contradicts with Anglophone theatre’s purist obsession to grasp “authenticity”, which is a paradigm still colonially distributed through media and academia. The play’s staging is revolutionary in the most pre-modern way: two performers use the “meddah” technique to embody the narrators and eleven characters each, where they tell and act the story without a fourth wall. Putting two “meddahs” in dialogue is a surprising use of tradition since the comedic “meddah” storytelling technique is known to be a solo performance tradition which originated in Anatolia and Mesopotamia. These two “meddahs” act on a stage designed with shadow images appearing in light screens behind them, images which also refer to the tradition of shadow puppetry in Turkey. Two “meddahs” sometimes go behind these screens and become a part of the shadows of the story and dissolve in the allegorical landscape. On the other hand Funeral of the Acrobat has a concrete dramatic structure with a chain of events layering from the most personal to the most social where the fictional Western Thracian village Yapıldak slowly becomes a microcosm of the transformation of the Turkish society in the last decade as a result of rapidly precipitating neoliberal urban transformation. Yapıldak exists in the same parallel universe of the planet Solaris of Stanislaw Lem, country of Uqbar of Jorge Luis Borges, or the town Macondo of Gabriel Garcia Márquez where allegory devours life and creates a habitat of truth beyond the stagnating pornography of our contemporary and mediatised “reality”.

2010

t h e c a m b r i d g e c o m p a n i o n t o a l l e g o r y Allegory is a vast subject, and its history can be daunting to students and even advanced scholars venturing outside their own historical specializations. This Companion will present, lucidly, systematically, and expertly, the various threads that comprise the allegorical tradition over its entire chronological range. Beginning with Greek antiquity, the volume shows how the earliest systems of allegory arose in poetry dealing with philosophy, mystery religions, and hermeneutics. Once the earliest histories and themes of the allegorical tradition have been presented, the volume turns to literary, intellectual, and cultural manifestations of allegory through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The essays in the last section address literary and theoretical approaches to allegory in the modern era, from reactions to allegory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to reevaluations of its power in the thought of the twentieth century and beyond.

Journal of Hellenic Studies 132, 2012

The Vitality of Allegory. Figural Narrative in Modern and Contemporary Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press 2012. 296 pp. Hardcover USD 41.95. ISBN 978-0814211823

Itinera, 13,, σσ. 93-108, 2017

Three major thinkers of theatre, Erving Goffman, Marvin Carlson and Bruce Wilshire, admit that theatre is an essential and central metaphor for life. Nevertheless, the two main questions of their discussion are, on the one hand, the existence of a range of moral criteria and values that differentiates the two worlds and, on the other, the possibility of defining the threshold between theatre and life.

Even after “allegory studies” develops as a discipline in its own right, what allegory is and what allegory means is still a contentious issue. This conference aims to address 20th century and contemporary theoretical applications for allegory, most notably in the work of Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man, and contrast them with the voices of scholars who consider this allegory a misinterpretation of a historically bound category.

Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies

Allegory is one of the distinguishing marks of many great works of literature. Over many centuries and cultures, authors have conveyed many symbolic messages about human life and the quest for religious faith in terms of different earthly trials and tribulations. These allegorical messages are closely linked, nonetheless, with many embodied conceptual metaphors that motivate different contemporary modes of thinking and language (e.g., life is a journey). My argument in this article is that literary allegory also has an important connection to our fundamental "allegorical impulse", in which humans automatically seek connections between the physical here and now with larger symbolic life themes. Allegory is a way we live, and seek meaning within our daily lives, that frequently gets elaborated upon in great works of literature.

Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 2015

Theatrical presentation of character relies on embodiment and mimesis where the novel constructs plausible character through the diegetic presentation of consciousness and action. This article argues that, with the introduction of stage censorship in the 1730s, allegorical prose romance mediates the transition from theatrical to novelistic modes of rendering plausible embodied character. Theatre and the novel in the mid-eighteenth century share a pre occupation with the relation of embodiment to allegorical abstraction, often represented in the figure of the Quixote, who mistakes one for the other. This essay charts the translation of techniques found in Henry Fielding’s satirical allegory in his short stage plays of the 1730s with three allegorical romances of 1736 that take Frederick, Prince of Wales, and his new bride, Princess Augusta of Saxa-Gothe-Altenburg, as the hero and heroine: Celenia and Hyempsal, The Adven tures of Prince Titi, and The Adventures of Eovaai. Discursive p...