Allegory: Between Deconstruction and Dialectics

Abstract

2. Craig Owens, 'The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism', published in two parts, October, no. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 67-86 and October, no. 13, Summer 1980, pp. 59-80; Douglas Crimp's essays from the early 1980s are anthologized in On the Museum's Ruins (The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993) citations are to the essay 'On the Museum's Ruins', p. 47; B. H. D. Buchloh, 'Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art', Artforum, vol. 21, no. 1, September 1982, pp. 43-56. Further contributions include Joel Fineman, 'The Structure of Allegorical Desire', October, no. 12, Spring 1980, pp. 47-66. Stephen Melville criticized these accounts in 1981, 'Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism', October, no. 19, Winter 1981, pp. 55-92. A wave of extended studies on allegory emerged from literary studies departments in the United States during the post-war period. See, for example, Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (Oxford University Press: New York, 1966), originally from 1959; Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 1964); Quilligan, The Language of Allegory, 1979. Paul de Man's seminal essay, 'The Rhetoric of Temporality' dates from 1969; references are to the version reprinted in Blindness and Insight: