Allegorical Dimension Research Articles

Viral Camus: Mapping cultural memory in the Covid era

This article evaluates the place of The Plague in the emergent cultural memory of the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the novel was said to have “gone viral” in popular culture. I ask what it means to reread The Plague in the current moment, a time characterized not just by a pandemic but by widespread unrest and social movements on both ends of the political spectrum. While rereadings of Camus in light of COVID-19 seem predicated on a turn away from the novel’s allegorical dimension, The Plague has taken on new metaphorical meanings in its Covid-era reception. Examining the proliferation of “readings” of the pandemic, in which the virus has been understood as a figure for collective social ills, this article highlights the place of Camus’s novel in the cultural memory of the crisis and proposes that it can illuminate some of the complex entanglements of our present.

Animalistic Attributes to Humans in the Greek Post-war Prose: From Realism to Modernism

This article analyzes the reasons, the means and the potential of using animalistic characteristics in the description of humans in Greek post-war prose (G.P-W.P). It deploys several seminal works of the Greek writers Nikos Kasdaglis, Alexandros Kotzias and Spyros Plaskovitis using specific criteria for their selection. The analysis of the works reveals that the animalistic motif is used to show the dehumanization of humans, caused by the extreme social conditions during World War II and the post-war era, which marked this generation of writers, and its allegorical dimension.

From other Exiles: Alienation or the Madness of Herzog?

This paper analyses how alienation in Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) results in madness and wisdom at the same time. Following this, the researcher will firstly examine the background of alienation and its silent assumptions by highlighting the following features: the search for truth, the marginalization, and the mental paralysis of the hero, Herzog. In line with the findings achieved at this stage, the researcher will secondly study how alienation scrupulously traces Herzog’s madness and wisdom, considering the relationships between alienation, on the one hand, and melancholy, oblivion and escapism, on the other hand. In the second part of this essay, the researcher will argue how madness is reflected in terms of wisdom and sanity. It is the wisdom of the marginalized intellectual in modern American society. Seen from this perspective, alienation and madness are argued to have satirical and allegorical dimensions as they entail reciprocal relationships with wisdom and sanity. The conclusion the researcher seeks to achieve is that when Herzog attempts to bypass and deconstruct the amoral ethics of modern American culture, he unexpectedly goes through various shifts from his being alienated, disregarded, rejected, mad and ultimately wise. Foucault’s (1967) and Deleuze’s (1968) concerns over the issues of madness and alienation prove to be an insightful theoretical platform in this paper.

“Stands for Itself Certainly”

Abstract J. M. Coetzee's trilogy of novels with Jesus in their titles, published between 2013 and 2019, has bewildered many reviewers. This essay review proposes that that bewilderment stems from a misconception of the novels’ allegorical dimension and of the possible meanings evoked by their titles. The trilogy is the consummation of Coetzee's meditations on analogy and linguistic skepticism; on the ontological status of fictions; on the eschatological impulsion of writing; and on memory's capacity for true recognitions that have no empirical basis. The trilogy presents us with a world that affirms a purely immanent life. Coetzee tests this world dialogically by subjecting its self-identical “here” to the nonidentical repetitions of analogical thought, through which an “elsewhere” impinges on the “here.” The trilogy's deepest questions turn on the metaphysical scope of this “elsewhere”: that is, on whether the vertiginous depths of analogy participate in an underlying substrate of meaning, recognizable as “the Word of God.”

The ʿAyniyyah of Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī: The Achievement of a Classical Arabic Allegorical Form

Abstract This paper aims to examine the renowned Early Islamic elegy, the ʿAyniyyah of the Mukhaḍram poet Abū Dhuʾayb al-Hudhalī in two respects. First, it examines the poem as an entirely unconventional example of a Classical Arabic elegiac poem (rithāʾ) in terms of its thematic structure of introductory lament to the poet’s dead sons followed by three panels: the onager, the oryx and knightly combat. It concludes that the tragic endings of all three panels constitute a dramatic inversion of the triumphal outcomes of such thematic panels in the pre-Islamic qaṣīdah in a manner that reflects al-Jāḥiẓ’s structural insights into the semantic functions of the animal panels in both elegy and qaṣīdah. Second, the paper explores the allegorical aspect of the thematic sections of the poem, the elegiac lament and the three tragic panels, in order to argue that they are a key to understanding the allegorical dimensions of such panels in the Early Arabic qaṣīdah tradition. The paper next explores Arabic critical terminology for the Western term “allegory,” such as tamthīl, umthūlah and majāz, only to conclude that none of them are adequate. Building especially on ʿAbd al-Qāhir al-Jurjānī’s proper understanding of majāz, the paper finally proposes a new etymologically and semantically sound neologism as an Arabic critical term for allegory: umjūzah.

Convergencia de lo onírico y lo alegórico en la narrativa de Manuel Scorza

En su obra novelística, el autor peruano Manuel Scorza hace uso de la fantasía y el mito para representar los conflictos entre los campesinos de los Andes peruanos, y los terratenientes, empresas mineras y autoridades. Como uno de sus recursos narrativos, el escritor reviste de características sobrenaturales a sus protagonistas, y abre un espacio onírico en que resulta posible concebir la posibilidad de derrota de los opresores, espacio que es clausurado violentamente por los desenlaces trágicos que culminan en la masacre de los campesinos. Además de inscribirse en un espacio textual onírico, los dones sobrenaturales metaforizan la esperanza de un pueblo, y permiten apreciar la dimensión alegórica de los personajes centrales.

The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins by Matt Losada

Reviewed by: The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins by Matt Losada Jens Andermann Losada, Matt. The Projected Nation: Argentine Cinema and the Social Margins. SUNY Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4384-7063-4. Matt Losada's survey study of the social geographies of Argentine cinema is a truly impressive achievement. Combining anthological knowledge of Argentina's cinematic canon with a solid command of film-analytical method as well and a deft capacity to put close-readings of individual works within wider contexts, including the shifts in production and distribution these respond to, The Projected Nation will become a major reference on the history of Argentine cinema. The book's selection and organization of the primary corpus is guided –admirably–by an interest in the role of (both urban and rural) scenarios that cinema inherited from literature's foundational fiction of the nation-state. Chapter 1, on representations of marginal urban and rural spaces in feature films of the first decades after 1900, offers fascinating insights into the way in which the new medium's adaptations of gauchesca characters and storylines also rearranges these in terms of emergent new national-popular alliances, different from those of turn-of-the-century literary criollismo. Perhaps the role of circus and theater as intermediaries between literary and filmic version of the gaucho repertoire could have been explored in more depth here. Yet, altogether, the chapter offers a comprehensive and erudite overview of Argentine silent cinema, often also including very knowledgeable readings of individual films' allegorical dimensions aimed at the mass audiences of Buenos Aires' 'peripheral modernity'. The chapter's final section on Alcides Greca's El último malón (1916) offers particularly compelling and nuanced reading of the way the latter calls on (and frequently also anticipates) a heterogeneous array of genres, thus also countering prevalent discourses of national modernity and progress and their casting of indigenous and mestizo subjects as barbaric remnants from another time. Chapter 2, on films of the 1930s and 1940s, rightly sides with Matthew Karush's characterization of classic studio cinema as targeted at popular audiences and thus as invested with less symbolic capital than foreign imports, which were being watched by urban literate publics (M. B. Karush, Culture of Class. Radio and Cinema in the Making of a Divided Argentina, 1920-1946. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). This focus on the sociology of film audiences might have benefited [End Page 169] from more extensive references to the literary field's more complex responses to the new medium: after all, writers such as Horacio Quiroga, Roberto Arlt and Jorge Luis Borges voraciously watched and reviewed both foreign and vernacular productions. Paying close attention to the spatial rhetorics of classic studio cinema, Losada analyzes here the emergence of a new form of cultural cartographics: his brilliant discussion of the deployment of synecdoche and asyndeton in Sebastián Naón's Nobleza gaucha (1937)—a loose adaptation of nationalist poet Leopoldo Lugones's homonymous epic—is exemplary in this respect. This subsection of the chapter is important also for the attention it pays to seldom-discussed early 'independent' works, including poet-dramatist Leonidas Barletta's Los afincaos (1941). A particularly compelling section discusses a series of 1930s studio productions in the context of State-driven 'national development' projects: Manuel Romero's La rubia del camino (1938), Arturo S. Mom's Petróleo (1940) and Mario Soffici's comedy classic Kilómetro 111 (1938), are being read here benefiting from the insights of cultural geography and literary topoanalysis alike. Moving on to Carlos Hugo Christensen's Con el diablo en el cuerpo (1947), Losada shows how, from very early on, the rules of metropolitan genres such as the screwball comedy were also being subverted in Argentine cinema by proto-auteurist gestures. The final section, section "From Arrabal to Villa", discusses the emergence in the 1950s of new scenarios of urban marginality, combining a nuanced understanding of the first villero films' spatial politics with contextual background on the apogee and overthrow of Peronism as well as the shift in production models from the project of an industrial, studio-based cinema of the 1930s and 1940s to more...

El proceso cartográfico de la reforma parroquial del arzobispo Lorenzana: propuestas planimétricas de José Antonio de Alzate y recreación ilustrada de la ciudad de México (1767-1772)

En 1772 el arzobispo Lorenzana aprobó una nueva distribución de las parroquias de la ciudad de México que quedó recogida en el “Plano de la Ymperial México”, levantado por José Antonio de Alzate. Desde 1767, el bachiller Alzate había preparado diversos modelos cartográficos donde discutió y reflexionó sobre la traza urbana, sus barrios y sus moradores. Sin embargo, el plan definitivo no correspondió con el proyecto original de Alzate, firmado en 1769, el cual fue sancionado por Carlos III. Dicho diseño fue resultado de una apresurada negociación que el prelado debió sostener con los eclesiásticos de la capital, donde se pusieron de manifiesto tensiones territoriales y jurisdiccionales. A partir del análisis de los materiales planimétricos, tanto los estrictamente visuales como los descritos en fuentes narrativas, en este artículo se aborda el “proceso cartográfico” en el que trascurrió la renovación de las demarcaciones religiosas de la Ciudad de México. Se estudia la reforma parroquial desde una perspectiva espacial, focalizando las sucesivas fases del reordenamiento, los ensayos cartográficos y las ideas ilustradas sobre la imagen de la ciudad. De manera particular, se acentúa la coexistencia dichos planteamientos ilustrados con otras concepciones barrocas que proveyeron una dimensión adicional de significados alegóricos a la urbe, representada como la Nueva Jerusalén.

Day-light. A recent discovery in the art of painting Ein kunstkritisches Pamphlet des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts

Abstract Henry James Richter’s 1817 pamphlet Day-light. A recent discovery in the art of painting; With hints on the philosophy of the fine arts, and on that of the human mind, as first dissected by Emanuel Kant has been read as a plea for naturalism in the context of early-nineteenth-century pleinair painting. The tract prompts painters to take the recently discovered phenomenon of colored shadows into account instead of basing their painterly practice on pictorial conventions. Although noticed, the peculiar form of the little treatise – consisting of thirteen pages of a fictive dialogue between artists and extensive notes devoted to fundamental epistemological questions – has not been further scrutinized. In the light of the sociopolitical conflicts of the time, however, the pamphlet takes on an allegorical dimension exceeding its art-critical objective.

Michael Psellos’ ‘Arrangement’ of Hermias’ Commentary on Plato’s Phaedrus

The Byzantine philosopher Michael Psellos (11th century) wrote a brief treatise entitled An Explanation of the Drive of the Soul Chariot and the Army of Gods According to Plato in the Phaedrus. The treatise consists of a compilation of excerpts from Hermias’ commentary on the Phae­drus. Psellos does not mention Hermias’ name but rather traces the origins of the treatise back to some “Greek theologians”. Psellos’ text presents a great interpretative challenge: the order of the myths about the charioteer and the parade of gods is reversed so that the former explicates the latter in such a way that the whole Platonic argument is dismissed as “absurd”. The Phaedrus in the Neo ‑Platonic tradition (in Iamblichus in particular) is considered to be a strictly theological dialogue. Yet, Psellos’ arrangement shows that he was not interested in the mythographical or allegorical dimension of the excerpts. He rath­er focused on the epistemic problem, i.e., a reduction of the trichotomy of the soul into a duality of principles. Thus, he followed certain Aristo­telian commentators. Psellos suggests a reduction that is subjectivist or individualist in its nature and he refuses to identify individual intellect with any particular piety.

Cultures of Confinement: Health, Illness, and Madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Magic Mountain

Cultures of Confinement:Health, Illness, and Madness in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Magic Mountain Robert Heynen (bio) In an article on war neuroses in Weimar Germany, Jason Crouthamel recounts the story of a disabled veteran's unusual challenge to medical and political authority in the aftermath of World War I: At a 1921 Berlin city assembly meeting, witnesses testified that a psychologically-disabled war victim under the pseudonym "Dr. Franzke-Rudolph" used false papers to disguise himself as a medical doctor in order to infiltrate his pension and health-care office. Once established in the administration area of the welfare office, this individual began to "incite rebellion" and, according to the police, attempted to set up a "communist headquarters" for the revolution led by welfare recipients. Local papers reported that in his clash with police just before he was led off to an asylum, the would-be doctor declared that the health-care administrators, insurance court clerks and doctors were all "mentally ill" and he called for a new system led by war victims themselves.1 Dr. Franzke-Rudolph's direct action was an astute and nuanced piece of political theater that pointed to a number of issues facing German veterans, most notably around access to social supports. His utopian plan for setting up a "communist headquarters" highlighted the extent to which questions of social welfare, health, and illness had become politicized, with anti-psychiatry ideas influencing the broader left-wing revolutionary movements of the post-World War I period.2 And, his subsequent confinement [End Page 683] in an asylum reflected a tactic used frequently by authorities seeking to suppress those movements. The modernist and avant-garde movements of the Weimar period were shaped in turn by these complex debates around psychiatric or medical confinement, radical politics, and war. Modernists had long appropriated experiences of madness and illness, with madness in particular both celebrated as offering a primitivist access to an untrammelled aesthetic and psychic freedom, while simultaneously signifying the destabilizing and fragmenting experience of modern life.3 For many, however, the experience of war and postwar revolution highlighted the inadequacy of these often vague and apolitical perspectives. In some cases, artists and writers themselves experienced medicalized confinement directly, some as patients (the expressionist playwright Ernst Toller, for example, who was also later imprisoned for his leading role in the Bavarian Soviet Republic), others as orderlies (the expressionist painter and printmaker Conrad Felixmüller). In part because of these direct experiences, but more broadly due to the experience of the brutality of war, in movements like Dada madness and illness were increasingly politicized. As with Franzke-Rudolph, practices of confinement themselves came to be seen as part of larger oppressive capitalist and militarist social structures.4 We need to be careful about making too much of this shift, however. Even after the war a romantic notion of madness remained influential, perhaps most notably in Hans Prinzhorn's 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill. Prinzhorn was a psychiatrist and art historian who worked in an asylum and collected the artworks produced by inmates. These he compared favorably with expressionism, although he insisted that inmates' art was spontaneous and unconscious, calling their work Bildnerei (image-making) in contrast to the consciously-produced Kunst (art) of artists. Artists flocked to him and his collection, but while he worked in an asylum, he had little to say about war, politics, or the institutional basis of psychiatric and medical confinement.5 What might a more politicized attention to the institutional politics of confinement, one closer to Franzke-Rudolph than Prinzhorn, bring to an understanding of the modernist fascination with madness and illness? To engage with this question, I will examine two of the most famous Weimar-era evocations of confinement, the asylum of Robert Wiene's 1920 film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps of Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. Both struggle with the complex intersections of madness, illness, and creativity, each foregrounding the material as well as the metaphorical or allegorical dimensions of confinement. Both film and novel respond to the rise of psychiatric medicine and psychoanalysis, and the...

The allegorical dimension in Pepetela's novel O quase fim do mundo

The aim of this text is to reflect on the construction of modern fantastic literature through the analysis of Pepetela’s novel O quase fim do mundo (2008). This is a novel about a catastrophe, namely the fact that the use of a weapon of mass destruction eliminates almost all humans and other animal species on Earth. I will observe the creation of unusual and plural worlds that promote the displacement from a real world that is not denied, but presented by the development of science and a new human status. This catastrophe allows for the emergence of a new era, with conditions and different lifestyles, which, in its turn, makes possible the rising of a communist society. However, this is not achieved, because if there are positive signs in this society, such as social equity, there is also evidence that proves the contrary, such as ethnic bias and a probable return of old style social classes and all that comes with it. This book also demonstrates how the concept of an absolute truth is replaced by other truths via constant historic and aesthetic displacements coming from new African writers and their writing.

Ritual, Code, and Matheme in Samuel Beckett's <em>Quad</em>

Samuel Beckett's 1981 television play, Quad, brings together the representational conventions of ritual, computational code and matheme. This television play presents a clear connection between Beckett's literary convictions, in particular his concept of the "unword" and its avant-garde possibilities, and the role of mathematics in art. The formal connections between the ritualistic, computational and allegorical dimensions of this television play, render Quad a "hyperstitional" work, one that is composed of twin formal elements: symbols without significance and superstition without belief. The relation between the television play and mathematics is thus not superficial or referential: Beckett's "hyperstitional" work produces a literary dimension that echoes the temporal and spatial stakes peculiar to twentieth century mathematics.

Remarks on Henry James

Organized around unidentified comments on all the papers, these notes comment on James’s career as a “man of letters,” on the gap between the role and form of the sentence in his writing and that of plot and event. The emphasis on observation (and even a certain voyeurism) is balanced against James’s “invention” of the sub-conversation, and a final speculation is offered on the work’s possible allegorical dimensions.

The Hunger Games, Spartacus , and Other Family Stories: Sentimental Revolution in Contemporary Young-Adult Fiction

The Hunger Games, Spartacus, and Other Family Stories: Sentimental Revolution in Contemporary Young-Adult Fiction David Aitchison It is already commonplace among scholars that Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy (2008–10) tells a kind of Spartacus story: one influenced by historical accounts of the gladiator, who, in 73 BCE, led a slave revolt against the Roman Empire, and by modern interpretations of his life, primarily Kirk Douglas and Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 big-screen epic Spartacus.1 Interviews with Collins are typically cited to corroborate this connection. In one, from 2011, she made explicit her debt to Spartacus’s life narrative, pointing out how protagonist Katniss Everdeen “follows the same arc from slave to gladiator to rebel” (Dominus n.p.). In another, from 2009, she described having researched “not only the historical Spartacus and the popular media about him, but many of the historical gladiators from pre-Christian times,” which led her to schematize the “three things always present” in what she calls the “gladiator paradigm: (1) a ruthless government that (2) forces people to fight to the death, and (3) uses these fights to the death as a form of popular entertainment” (Blasingame 727). Not insignificantly, this paradigm has long been subject to rival interpretations, perhaps best exemplified in the play between two definitive Spartacus novels of modern times, Arthur Koestler’s indictment of communist idealism, The Gladiators (1939), and Howard Fast’s sympathetic lament for failed communist revolution, Spartacus (1951). Though arguably written for a different audience, the Hunger Games trilogy takes its place in this tradition of fictions contesting the political and ethical virtues of the gladiator. To say that Collins is suspicious of the pleasure afforded by the gladiator paradigm is to acknowledge that there is debate over the allegorical dimensions of the arena as a social space—that is, over the ethics of what individuals, in relation to one another, feel compelled to do in order to [End Page 254] survive. A very different kind of Spartacus story, for instance, has evolved recently in the movement between Ridley Scott’s blockbuster Gladiator (2000) and cable channel Starz’s Spartacus (2010–13), neither of which puts pressure on the differential between self-interest and self-sacrifice as the Hunger Games novels do. While the Starz series echoes a number of plot elements from Gladiator,2 Gladiator paid homage to Douglas’s Spartacus,3 a film in turn based on Fast’s novel. Notably, though tempering the revolutionary optimism of the original, Douglas’s adaptation still tells a leftist story in which the divisiveness of the arena is countered by an unwavering solidarity—brought home in the well-known “I am Spartacus” scene, where the captured rebels would sooner die defying the Romans than betray the cause. Keeping Spartacus (1951) and Spartacus (1960) in mind, we do well to remember that gladiator fictions are sometimes driven by a desire to care for, rather than punish, bodies politic. For some critics, admittedly, works like The Hunger Games are less about probing political reality and more about capturing the universal tumult of adolescence. Laura Miller, for example, finds Collins’s trilogy “intelligible” only when considered “as a fever-dream allegory of the adolescent social experience”: more precisely, “it’s not about persuading the reader to stop something terrible from happening—it’s about what’s happening, right this minute, in the stormy psyche of the adolescent reader” (n.p.). The shortcoming of this diagnosis is that it makes little room for any outward turn of the young reader’s imagination. Consider, for example, the moment when teenager Katniss volunteers on behalf of her younger sister to take part in the Hunger Games, a state-enforced fight to the death between twelve- to eighteen-year-old representatives from districts subjugated and exploited by the centralized power of the Capitol. By Miller’s account, Collins’s readers relate to what Katniss feels without grasping the painfully political nature of her feelings. By my account, we do these readers a disservice unless we acknowledge that they are poised more properly to work through the stormy stuff not of psyche, as such, but of political consciousness. Not all of the trilogy’s...

‘Con la propria mia voce parli’. Literary Genres, Portraits, and Voices in Giuseppe Betussi’s Imagini del tempio (1556)

Giuseppe Betussi’s Imagini del tempio della signora donna Giovanna Aragona (1556) offers a privileged insight into the inner workings of encomium as a crucial self-authorizing experience in Renaissance culture. In this perspective, the paper focuses on: a) the strategic blending of literary genres as a response to the tensions of a challenging editorial market; b) the pivotal role of figurative metaphors in the self-depiction of celebrative texts and their connection with the memorial and allegorical dimensions; and c) the multiplication of textual voices and layers as a means of staging celebration itself as an ongoing performance, combining monumental accomplishment and verbal dynamism. It considers the question of why Betussi seemingly connects a small corpus of lyric texts (the sonnets quoted in the Imagini) to a major collection (Ruscelli’s 1554 Tempio alla divina signora Giovanna d’Aragona) by means of a dialogue between Truth and Fame and proposes that the figure of Truth enables Betussi to modulate one single voice from the apparent interaction of many, ultimately building on well-established collective models to create a solo encomiastic anthology.

Star Trek and the Musical Depiction of the Alien Other

The multimedia franchise is an increasingly significant part of modern media culture. This article is a case study in reading franchise music. Star Trek spans forty-eight years and consists primarily of six television series and twelve films. These media texts share audiences, fictions and even musical material. This rich site of musical investigation is explored through considering the way in which music depicts alien ‘Others’. First, to illustrate the varied, multifaceted, multi-authored space of television series music, the franchise’s musical processes are considered by examining contrasting strategies of the musical depictions of aliens within the same series. Second, to explore the franchise’s musical space over a broader span of time and variety of media, the evolution of the music for one particular alien species over both film and television is traced from the 1960s to the early 2000s. Star Trek uses music to articulate alterity in a variety of ways. In some episodes/films, differing degrees of alterity are musically expressed, while in others, alien identities are created either through generic musical signifiers of the exoticised ‘Other’ or through reference to particular real-world identities (introducing an allegorical dimension to the depiction). Composed ‘source music’ also contributes to the representation of an alien species. Musical depictions evolve as the same aliens reoccur throughout the franchise with different narrative roles to play, while the different media bring their own practices and contexts to bear upon the musical depictions. The textually-grounded musical analysis in this article demonstrates how franchise music can be ‘read’.

Flora Gomes’s Postcolonial Engagement and Redefinition of Amílcar Cabral’s Politics of National Culture in Nha Fala

This article looks at the politics of culture in modern Guinea-Bissau in the film and, in particular, Flora Gomes’s re-interpretation of the country’s traditional understanding of national culture and engagement with oral tradition as a form of questioning instability, political unrest, disunity, and dissenting voices. It argues that it is impossible to examine Gomes’s representation of Guinea-Bissau’s national culture without an understanding of how these issues relate to Amílcar Cabral — the hero and mentor of the country’s independence to whom he dedicates the film — and his take on the intricate conceptual relationship between ‘nation’ and ‘culture’, hence national culture. It then examines Gomes’s redefinition of the postcolonial space through engagement with Cabral, in terms of his ideology of the nation and demand for a ‘return to the source’. Thirdly, it looks at silence and allegorical dimensions in Nha Fala, critically examining Guinea-Bissau’s insecurity, its confrontation of border issues and move away from the traditional pattern of colonial heritage by embracing a wider political arena in Africa. Within silence or mutism, it looks at the cultural, political, and monetary role of France as the new and invisible force which manages the country’s economy whilst wrestling Guinea-Bissau away from its Portuguese heritage. It contends that Gomes appropriates existing oral tradition to interrogate social exclusion, unemployment, lack of education and accountability, in order to preserve societal equilibrium, by claiming Cabral’s rightful place in modern Guinea-Bissau.

Tennis in Early Modern Visual Culture

Taking as its departure point the celebrated passage in Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo on the game of pallacorda, this paper is an invitation to re-read the ample visual documentation on the game, on its perception and its representation in early modern Europe. In fact, prints and paintings produced between the end of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries testify to the vast and complex panorama of themes and motifs which marked the development of the imagerie linked to games (in particular, its allegorical dimension), and to tennis as its most noble expression. The metaphor conceived by Galileo and the interest of other scientists in games as a source of models and illustrative examples can be seen as part of a broader cultural and social sensibility in which games played a central role.

Biography as allegory

Through comparison with Dante’s Divine Comedy and with Late Antique allegorical interpretations of the Bible this article makes the case that Byzantine hagiographers encoded an allegorical dimension into their texts and that they did so in order to make value judgements that complement explicit evaluations of the behaviour of saints.