Allegory After Modernism : A History of a Structure of Thought
出版項
2020
說明
1 online resource (358 pages)
文字
text
無媒介
computer
成冊
online resource
附註
Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 82-02, Section: A
Advisor: Hills, David;Marrinan, Michael;McGurl, Mark;Nemerov, Alexander
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2020
Includes bibliographical references
This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case studies of four sites of allegorical thought and practice in late twentieth-century American cultural production, with a focus on post-WWII art, theory, literature, and material culture: Aldous Huxley's psychedelic writings in dialogue with the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis and his critics; the relationship between materiality and hermeneutics in Ken Kesey's communal art project, Furthur; the literary theory of Paul de Man, where allegory becomes conflated with irony; and allegorical structure and performativity in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Understanding allegory as a structure of thought-a transmedial structure based on an urge for meaning-making inherent in the human mind that is modified and adapted in response to evolving historical contexts, circumstances, and pressures-it examines these sites of allegorical transformation to ask how allegory was mobilized, theorized, or used by historical actors working within the limits of their contextual conditions of possibility. In doing so, it asks how recent changes in allegorical form, structure, and function come to shape the mode's contemporary appearance, arguing that allegory's structure undergoes a progressive flattening of levels as its aesthetic transcendence is reimagined as aesthetic immanence
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest, 2021
