Thinking Allegory Otherwise (review)

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.

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.

The allegory is too often dismissed as an artificial literary device.At leat one critic admits that allegories arise spontaneously and the consequence of their generation are not subject to the full control of the conscious mind . In the case of inquiries concerning the paperback version of this document please use the message facility indicated by an envelope

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

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.

Journal of Hellenic Studies 132, 2012

This introduction situates the project of Cognitive Allegory, beginning with an overview of the reading-and-writing practice of allegoresis and the cluster of rhetorical, literary and speech genres that can be classed as allegory. The study of figuration, a concern of literary critics, rhetoricians, philosophers of language, cognitive linguists and psychologists has, since the advent of Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live been dominated by metaphor. Harris and Tolmie, and the essayists in this special issue, drawn from diverse fields, make the case for allegory as a network of genres that draws on the cognitive resources of analogy plus narrative-through devices like personification and topification, and extension of analogic frames like "LIFE IS A JOURNEY"-making it even richer for study. Cognitive psychologist Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr., explores the allegorical impulse in everyday speech; philosopher Paul Thagard advances a multiconstraint theory of analogy and applies it to Orwell's Animal Farm; and in two collaborative papers, literary critics Madeleine Kasten and Curtis Gruenler compare Langland's Piers Plowman and Voltaire's Candide, and rhetoricians Todd Oakley and Peter Crisp compare Pilgrim's Progress and the digital video Third Race at the Honeymoon is Over Downs, deploying the resources of Fauconnier and Turner's conceptual blending theory.

2020

For the last 200 years in literary aesthetics a radical opposition has been drawn between allegory and symbol, though no opposition like this was drawn previously. Allegory has generally been regarded as inferior to symbol, supposedly being arbitrary and mechanical where symbol was motivated and imaginative. Although more recently post-structuralists have praised allegory over symbol, they have still believed that it is radically arbitrary. In fact, allegory and symbol are both large-scale expressions of conceptual metaphor and as such are both equally motivated and equally suggestive in meaning. The illusion of a radical opposition between them is to be explained by the ideological self-interest of literary and artistic intellectuals.

Through a Glass Darkly: Allegory and Faith in Netherlandish Prints from Lucas van Leyden to Rembrandt, 2019

Also by Lynette Hunter and also published by Macmillan. G. K. CHESTERTON, EXPLORATIONS IN ALLEGORY ook follows G. K. Chesterton's exploration of allegory as a mode expressed for him the existence of an external world and the lce of a divine with the least amount of authorial distortion. RHETORICAL STANCE IN MODERN LITERATURE unter's book makes demanding reading. .. . At the same time, it is not a book for the common reader, it has none of the faults often llted to, and sometimes actually found in, academic studies of literary y. There is no unexplained jargon. All is clear, well planned and ssed to the rational unspecialized person wanting to know more the method of modern literary scholarship in this area'-W. W.