Who is Afraid of Allegorical Thinking?

Abstract

Abstract:Alluring but stylistically and ethically dubious, allegorical expressions have come to take on multiple guises: ambivalent or pernicious clichés; concepts and universals not individuals and particulars; charismatically embodied but ethically empty attributes, affective stances, or philosophical traditions; rhetorical debates about ideals not people; didactic lessons; and ideological critique. As became prominent in theories of the novel, allegory was not only ideologically incongruous to the novel’s liberal politics; indeed, it was anathema to one of the realist novel’s defining features—descriptive detail—a legacy that can be traced to the essays of Georg Lukács that were later translated as The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1969). Pace Lukács, this essay suggests that approaching detail and allegory as companionable aesthetic categories can show us how such categories have been instrumentalized toward grand claims about how forms work for hegemonic political ends, and how advocating for their media-tive function can not only enliven the literature we read but also how we think about the value of criticism.