Resisting Allegory

Resisting Allegory PDF Author: Harry Berger
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823285642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Spenser is a delirious poet. He can’t plough straight. What he builds is shiftier, twistier, than anything dreamed up or put down by M. C. Escher. So begins Resisting Allegory, in which the leading Spenser critic of our time sums up a lifelong commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Spenser’s great poem provides the occasion for a searching and comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of reading practices3⁄4those the author advocates as well as those he adapts or criticizes in entertaining a wide range of critical arguments with his celebrated combination of intellectual generosity and rigorous questioning. Berger is interested in how details of the poem's language—phrases, images, figures on which we haven’t put enough interpretive pressure—disconcert traditional interpretations and big discourses that the poem has often been thought to serve. Central to this volume is an attention to the deployment of gender in conjunction with the Berger’s notion of narrative complicity. Resisting Allegory offers a model of theoretically sophisticated criticism that never wavers in its close attention to the text. Berger offers a sustained and brilliantly articulated resistance not only to allegory, as the title indicates, but also to prevalent modes of cultural and historical criticism. As in all of Berger’s books, a lucid reflection on questions of method—based on a profound and richly theoretically informed understanding of the workings of language and of the historical situations of the people involved in it—are interwoven with an interpretive practice that serves as an exemplary pedagogical model. Berger attends to historical and political context while deeply respecting the ways in which text can never be reduced to context. This distinctive and original book makes clear the scope and coherence of the critical vision elaborated Berger has elaborated in a lifetime of seminal and still-challenging critical arguments.

Resisting Allegory

Resisting Allegory PDF Author: Harry Berger
Publisher: Fordham University Press
ISBN: 0823285642
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Spenser is a delirious poet. He can’t plough straight. What he builds is shiftier, twistier, than anything dreamed up or put down by M. C. Escher. So begins Resisting Allegory, in which the leading Spenser critic of our time sums up a lifelong commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Spenser’s great poem provides the occasion for a searching and comprehensive interdisciplinary exploration of reading practices3⁄4those the author advocates as well as those he adapts or criticizes in entertaining a wide range of critical arguments with his celebrated combination of intellectual generosity and rigorous questioning. Berger is interested in how details of the poem's language—phrases, images, figures on which we haven’t put enough interpretive pressure—disconcert traditional interpretations and big discourses that the poem has often been thought to serve. Central to this volume is an attention to the deployment of gender in conjunction with the Berger’s notion of narrative complicity. Resisting Allegory offers a model of theoretically sophisticated criticism that never wavers in its close attention to the text. Berger offers a sustained and brilliantly articulated resistance not only to allegory, as the title indicates, but also to prevalent modes of cultural and historical criticism. As in all of Berger’s books, a lucid reflection on questions of method—based on a profound and richly theoretically informed understanding of the workings of language and of the historical situations of the people involved in it—are interwoven with an interpretive practice that serves as an exemplary pedagogical model. Berger attends to historical and political context while deeply respecting the ways in which text can never be reduced to context. This distinctive and original book makes clear the scope and coherence of the critical vision elaborated Berger has elaborated in a lifetime of seminal and still-challenging critical arguments.

Resisting Allegory

Resisting Allegory PDF Author: Harry Berger, Jr.
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823285631
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
In Resisting Allegory, the leading Spenser critic of our time sums up a lifelong commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Central to this volume is an attention to the deployment of gender in conjunction with the Berger's notion of narrative complicity, all built on close attention to the text.

Resisting Allegory

Resisting Allegory PDF Author: Harry Berger (Jr.)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823285655
Category : Electronic books
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
In Resisting Allegory, the leading Spenser critic of our time sums up a lifelong commitment to the theory and practice of textual interpretation. Central to this volume is an attention to the deployment of gender in conjunction with the Berger's notion of narrative complicity, all built on close attention to the text.

Resisting Allegory

Resisting Allegory PDF Author: Berger, Jr. (Harry)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780823288861
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description


Horace's Narrative Odes

Horace's Narrative Odes PDF Author: Michèle Lowrie
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198150534
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Narrative has not traditionally been a subject in the analysis of lyric poetry. This book deconstructs the polarity that divides and binds lyric and narrative means of representation in Horace's Odes. While myth is a canonical feature of Pindaric epinician, Horace cannot adopt the Pindaricmode for aesthetic and political reasons. Roman Callimacheanism's privileging of the small and elegant offers a pretext for Horace to shrink from the difficulty of writing praise poetry in the wake of civil war. But Horace by no means excludes story-telling from his enacted lyric. On the formallevel, numerous odes contain narration. Together they constitute a larger narrative told over the course of Horace's two lyric collections. Horace tells the story of his development as a lyricist and of the competing aesthetic and political demands on his lyric poetry. At issue is whether he canever truly become a poet of praise.

Allegory in Iranian Cinema

Allegory in Iranian Cinema PDF Author: Michelle Langford
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350113263
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Iranian filmmakers have long been recognised for creating a vibrant, aesthetically rich cinema whilst working under strict state censorship regulations. As Michelle Langford reveals, many have found indirect, allegorical ways of expressing forbidden topics and issues in their films. But for many, allegory is much more than a foil against haphazardly applied censorship rules. Drawing on a long history of allegorical expression in Persian poetry and the arts, allegory has become an integral part of the poetics of Iranian cinema. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explores the allegorical aesthetics of Iranian cinema, explaining how it has emerged from deep cultural traditions and how it functions as a strategy for both supporting and resisting dominant ideology. As well as tracing the roots of allegory in Iranian cinema before and after the 1979 revolution, Langford also theorizes this cinematic mode. She draws on a range of cinematic, philosophical and cultural concepts - developed by thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Christian Metz and Vivian Sobchack - to provide a theoretical framework for detailed analyses of films by renowned directors of the pre-and post-revolutionary eras including Masoud Kimiai, Dariush Mehrjui, Ebrahim Golestan, Kamran Shirdel, Majid Majidi, Jafar Panahi, Marziyeh Meshkini, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Rakhshan Bani-Etemad and Asghar Farhadi. Allegory in Iranian Cinema explains how a centuries-old means of expression, interpretation, encoding and decoding becomes, in the hands of Iran's most skilled cineastes, a powerful tool with which to critique and challenge social and cultural norms.

Allegory and the Work of Melancholy

Allegory and the Work of Melancholy PDF Author: Jeremy Tambling
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004490795
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Written using critical theory, especially by Walter Benjamin, Blanchot and Derrida, Allegory and the Work of Melancholy: The Late Medieval and Shakespeare reads medieval and early modern texts, exploring allegory within texts, allegorical readings of texts, and melancholy in texts. Authors studied are Langland and Chaucer, Hoccleve, on his madness, Lydgate and Henryson. Shakespeare's first tetralogy, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III conclude this investigation of death, mourning, madness and of complaint. Benjamin's writings on allegory inspire this linking, which also considers Dürer, Baldung and Holbein and the dance of the dead motifs. The study sees subjectivity created as obsessional, paranoid, and links melancholia, madness and allegorical creation, where parts of the subject are split off from each other, and speak as wholes. Allegory and melancholy are two modes – a state of writing and a state of being - where the subject fragments or disappears. These texts are aware of the power of death within writing, which makes them, fascinating. The book will appeal to readers of literature from the medieval to the Baroque, and to those interested in critical theory, and histories of visual culture.

Thinking Allegory Otherwise

Thinking Allegory Otherwise PDF Author: Brenda Machosky
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804763801
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
"Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways." "Not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, the essays focus on a wide range of topics, including architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. Indeed, all language is allegorical. This collection proves the truth of this statement, but more importantly, it shows the consequences of it. To think allegory otherwise is to think otherwise-forcing us to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality offigurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends." --Book Jacket.

Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria

Allegorical Readers and Cultural Revision in Ancient Alexandria PDF Author: David Dawson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520910389
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
Allegorical readings of literary or religious texts always begin as counterreadings, starting with denial or negation, challenging the literal sense: "You have read the text this way, but I will read it differently." David Dawson insists that ancient allegory is best understood not simply as a way of reading texts, but as a way of using non-literal readings to reinterpret culture and society. Here he describes how some ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian interpreters used allegory to endorse, revise, and subvert competing Christian and pagan world views. This reassessment of allegorical reading emphasizes socio-cultural contexts rather than purely formal literary features, opening with an analysis of the pagan use of etymology and allegory in the Hellenistic world and pagan opposition to both techniques. The remainder of the book presents three Hellenistic religious writers who each typify distinctive models of allegorical interpretation: the Jewish exegete Philo, the Christian Gnostic Valentinus, and the Christian Platonist Clement. The study engages issues in the fields of classics, history of Christianity and Hellenistic Judaism, literary criticism and theory, and more broadly, critical theory and cultural criticism.

Allegory and Enchantment

Allegory and Enchantment PDF Author: Jason Crawford
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198788045
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
Allegory and Enchantment is about the genealogies of modernity, and about the lingering power of some of the cultural forms against which modernity defines itself: religion, magic, the sacramental, the medieval. Jason Crawford explores the emergence of modernity by investigating the early modern poetics of allegorical narrative, a literary form that many modern writers have taken to be paradigmatically medieval. He investigates how allegory is intimatelylinked with a self-conscious modernity, and with what many commentators have, in the last century, called 'the disenchantment of the world', in four of the most substantial allegorical narratives produced inearly modern England: William Langland's Piers Plowman, John Skelton's The Bowge of Courte, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress.