Allegorical Reading Research Articles

Abelard’s Exegesis of the Song of Songs in his Second Letter to Heloise

In this paper I am making the argument that the brief excursus on the Song of Songs in Abelard’s second letter to Heloise (the fifth in the Correspondence) contains exegesis of a few phrases of this biblical book that is so far out of the ordinary that it cannot be taken seriously and was not intended to be. This argument is based on the following observations: the lines presented as being from the Song of Songs are not really biblical verses; no remotely comparable exegesis of these phrases exists in earlier and contemporaneous exegesis; the literal interpretation that Abelard applies besides an allegorical reading was expressly forbidden by authorities both old and new; and finally Abelard’s alleged exegesis conflicts absolutely with his own exegesis of the same elements in authenticated works.

“Furnace-smoke ... wrapt him round”: Industrial Hinduism and Global Empire in The Curse of Kehama and Sir Thomas More

My essay claims that Robert Southey uses Hinduism to fashion a poetics of Romantic-era technology inThe Curse of Kehama(1810). In his neglectedSir Thomas More; or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society(1829), Southey compares the manufacturing system to Indian theology and ritual, a metaphor that relativizes religion and technology while implying that the Industrial Revolution amounts to a new breed of religious network. Southey next likens the emergent world order made possible by such technologies to the cosmic ambitions of Kehama, his own Indian tyrant-cum-demigod. TheColloquiesthus suggests an allegorical reading ofThe Curse of Kehama, whereby this tale of a king bent on cosmic rule simultaneously explores how technological and imperial networks intertwine. Accordingly, I draw from metaphor theory to read the earlierKehamaas a repository of veiled comparisons and displacements through which Southey glimpses the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution. Just as Indian wealth propels the techno-imperial enterprise described in theColloquies,Kehama’s paganism supplies the raw discursive material through which Southey fashions a poetics of manufacturing. Read alongside theColloquies,Kehamaaestheticizes the connection between imperial and technological systems, expresses the imaginative significance of twinned manufacturing novelties—the steam engine and coke smelting—and concretizes the opaque moral and poetic properties attaching to industrial power by depicting it in reference to the minutiae of Hindu religion so far as Southey understood it.

Allegorical reading and understanding on <The Biography of Mr. Coin> and <The Biography of Fine - River Envoy Darkgrey - Man>

Allegorical reading and understanding on <The Biography of Mr. Coin> and <The Biography of Fine - River Envoy Darkgrey - Man>

The Lion, the Honey, and the New Timnite Woman: Joseph and Aseneth and the Samson Cycle

This study presents a solution for the symbol of the honeycomb employed in Joseph and Aseneth, an ancient Hellenistic Jewish novel, by recognizing signals throughout the rest of the narrative that point to an allegorical reading of Samson's encounter with the lion in Judg. 14.5–9. The thesis is that the author of Joseph and Aseneth is providing an allegorical reading of Judg. 14.5–9, where Samson is a type of wayward Israel and the Timnite woman represents foreign domination. The lion and the honey are interpreted as symbols of Samson's subsequent victory over his Philistine foes, and this symbolical movement is applied to Aseneth's transformed identity. Aseneth is a new Timnite woman and Joseph is a new Samson, reconfigured to triumph over her seductive influence. Parallels are drawn between a constructed allegorical reading of the Samson cycle and the encounter of Aseneth with Joseph and later with the heavenly man. The theological themes upon which such a reading relies are discussed.

Une rencontre autour de Kafka Walter Benjamin et Roland Barthes

In this article, Rony Klein deals with a striking meeting-point between two readers of Kafka : Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. These two readings both start with the same strong rejection of Max Brod’s allegorical and theological interpretation of Kafka. In the early Thirties of the 20th century, Benjamin was the first to criticize Brod’s approach, claiming that Kafka should be interpreted through his writings and not as a Thinker who delivers some kind of “message”. In this sense, the fruitful method of reading should carefully follow the signs of Kafka’s world, i.e. the clerks, the fathers, the figures of the margins – the students, the clowns, the assistants – in order to understand the writer’s world in its coherence. This method of reading foreshadows surprisingly enough the French structural readings of Kafka in the Fifties and Sixties, e.g. that of Marthe Robert, which was adopted by Roland Barthes in an important article. Indeed, like Benjamin, Barthes seeks to extirpate Kafka from the allegorical readings. He criticizes Brod, but also the Existentialist interpretations in Post-War France. According to Barthes, we have to read Kafka as a writer, i.e. in his art. Barthes, following Marthe Robert, reads Kafka not as a writer of symbols, but as a writer of allusions, where every single allusion conveys to another one. Like Benjamin, Marthe Robert and Barthes look for Kafka’s coherence in his writing, in the chain of his signifiers. That which was designated by Benjamin as “world” is now named “structure” or “whole”. Nevertheless, the two readings obey the same rigorous logic. This fact proves Kafka’s fruitfulness in the Literary Research during the 20th Century as well as the subtleness of Benjamin’s intuitions as a Critique, which prefigure a lot of Theoretical adventures of the century.

Till We Have Facesas Myth and Allegory

Till We Have Faces is widely regarded by admirers of C.S. Lewis as his best work of fiction, and also the most enigmatic. While it is not obviously didactic, most readers have a sense that a meaning lurks in it that cannot be ascertained by a conventional analysis of the plot, the observations of the narrator and her developing awareness of her own motives. It is argued here that Lewis, who was familiar with allegorical readings of the tale of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius and with at least some later imitations, may have been sufficiently influenced by these precedents to conceive his own tale as a partial allegory, in which Orual represents the fleshly or somatic element in humanity, sharing both in the labours of the soul and in its ultimate redemption.

The Map, the Territory, and the Impossibility of Painting a Priest

The article focuses on the relationship between capitalism and religion through an allegorical double reading of social theory and fiction. Theoretically it discusses capitalism as religion. Empirically it analyses Michel Houellebecq’s recent novel The Map and the Territory. Houellebecq’s is a late modern world in which capital tends to replace, like a map, the actual experience of life, the territory. A world in which everything is modelled on the logic of businesses and capitalism has taken the place of religion. However, The Map and the Territory distils the relationship between religion and capitalism anew, and this relationship, together with the political questions it invites, is the leitmotiv for the considerations here.

Deep narrow territories

It is always a pleasure to observe Peter Harrison deploying his skill in argument, repertoire of apt quotations, and power of analogy. One argument joins so neatly to the next that it seems willful to withhold assent from the conclusion. Having enjoyed the sparkle, however, it is well to consider how it is achieved. The principal means, conspicuous also in Harrison’s earlier book, The Bible: Protestantism and the Rise of Science (1998), is a very tight focus: the argument, repertoire, and analogies achieve their effect by operating in a domain of inquiry restricted more severely, and sometimes less justifiably, than might at first appear. In The Bible, Harrison argued that by doing away with allegorical readings of scripture, Protestants liberated ‘‘the study of the natural world from the specifically religious concern of biblical interpretation.’’ The fruit of this liberation fell far from the tree. ‘‘The literalist mentality initiated by the Protestant reformers, and sponsored by their successors [was]....by far the most significant [cause]...for the rise of modern science.’’ With this bold extrapolation, Harrison made the reformers’ method of sola scriptura serve as a motive, indeed, the main motive, for the very diverse sorts of thinking and acting required to investigate and apply natural knowledge. The ascendency of bible reading over all other putative causes of the Scientific Revolution, however brilliantly argued, is not very convincing. The Territories of Science and Religion follows the method of sola scriptura to conclude that clashes between the territories could not have occurred before the Reformation. In England they started even later, in the last third of the nineteenth century. Harrison’s crisp argument for this chronology is quickly summarized. He observes that ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘religion’’ (SR that before the watershed they had to do with the internal cultivation of the individual and after it with a public confession

Beyond the Allegory: The Grotesque Body and the Limits of Liberation in Marlene Van Niekerk’s Agaat.

Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (translated into English by Michiel Heyns) details the subjectivity of its bed-ridden and paralysed protagonist, Milla Redelinghuys, as well as the complex relationship she shares with her caregiver, Agaat. Through reading Milla’s body in relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the grotesque, this article aims to explore the ways in which the text problematizes overly allegorical readings of the novel that emphasize Milla’s death as leading to Agaat experiencing rebirth. This is achieved through focusing on the ways in which Van Niekerk undermines the sense of social transcendence that Bakhtin considers indispensable to the carnival. In order to do this, I examine two instances that most closely align Milla’s corporeality with Bakhtin’s idea of the grotesque: the scene in which Milla pretends to be dying in order to play a joke on her neighbour is read in relation to the idea of ‘carnival laughter’, and the scene in which she wakes up to discover Agaat sleeping on her bed is analysed through Bakhtin’s description of the ‘two-bodied image’. I conclude that these gestures towards an association with the grotesque form part of the larger project of incompletion that Van Niekerk stages in the novel.

Allegorical Reading of Guyon: The Knight of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book II

Allegorical Reading of Guyon: The Knight of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book II

“Write as I bid you”: Eruptive Baroque Aesthetics in Wycherley’s The Country Wife

Abstract This article argues that J. Douglas Canfield’s idea that baroque characteristics “persisted” in neoclassical literature can do more than just mark moments of exuberant rhetoric and imagery in Restoration texts. Rather, combining scholarship on the baroque by Peter Davidson and Walter Benjamin with Restoration studies reveals that the baroque is an underappreciated feature of Restoration drama that erupts from its neoclassicism and emblematizes aristocratic ideology about the constructed social, economic, and political order of the Restoration. Taking stock of specific historical issues negotiated by Charles II’s regime, therefore, provides the inventory of meanings a baroque eruption signals. Mr. Pinchwife’s surprising and violent threat to his wife Margery in The Country Wife is the article’s primary example. Allusions to Shakespeare’s Othello and the Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation are revealed to be couched in Pinchwife’s outburst; they demand an allegorical reading in light of contemporary ideology about noblemen and anti-Catholicism.

Child Abuse or Discipline? Moses Isegawa’s Critique of Ugandan Child-rearing Practices in Abyssinian Chronicles

Although Moses Isegawa’s debut novel, Abyssinian Chronicles, has received popular recognition in the press, it is yet to attract commensurate critical attention in literary scholarship. No wonder the available critical analyses of this important Ugandan text focus on only its political theme. Its commentators argue that the domestic story of the depicted family uncannily corresponds to important historical moments in the Ugandan polity. This allegorical reading ignores one of the several interesting tangents of the novel – the deployment of corporal punishment as a child-rearing practice in Uganda– that I interrogate in this article. I argue that Isegawa provides profound insights into how some Ugandan families’ obsession with the idea of a “well-behaved” child paradoxically turns sites such as homes and schools associated with nurturing and securing children into arenas of child abuse. Furthermore, I argue that Isegawa’s text crafts a mask for its protagonist to effectively disclose the violation and abuse that some children are immersed in a manner that rescues abused and violated children from being perceived as mere statistical footnotes to Uganda’s postcolonial troubles. Thus, I argue that Isegawa’s text acts as a monument to some Ugandan children abused at the altar of moulding visibly and respectably obedient children.

Literary and Rhetorical Theory in Irenaeus, Part 2

In his well-known Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church Manlio Simonetti asserted that Irenaeus of Lyons was unable to offer principled opposition to Gnostic allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures and, therefore, resorted to the authority of tradition. Such a reading not only overlooks the hermeneutical principles upon which Irenaeus founds his polemic against Gnostic interpretations, but fails to recognize the theory undergirding those principles. This article, the second of a two-part study, offers a new reading. I argue that Irenaeus opposes Gnostic interpretations of Scripture, including their allegorical readings (broadly conceived), by articulating and applying hermeneutical principles that draw upon ancient literary and rhetorical theory.

Arthurian Romance between Parody and Unbridled Allegory: La Mule sanz frain

La Mule sanz frain, usually read as an Arthurian parody, simultaneously advances and undercuts tantalizing claims to veiled spiritual meaning, interrogating the formal bases and the stakes of chivalric romance’s fraught relationship with allegorical reading and writing after Chrétien de Troyes and in parallel to the Queste del Saint Graal.

Rhapsodies on Midiexiang: Jian'an Period Reflections on an Exotic Plant from Rome

At the end of the Han dynasty, a group of five rhapsodies were produced by some of the most important poets of the day, celebrating the presence of plants from the Roman Empire in the gardens of Cao Pi, the future first emperor of the Wei dynasty. Previously when these poems have been studied, it has been in the context of straightforward appreciation of their subject's scent and beauty. However, this group of rhapsodies is important for understanding how unfamiliar foreign objects were integrated into literary representations of the elite worldview of the period. In this political reading of the five rhapsodies, the presence of plants brought half-way across the known world in Cao Pi's garden are expressions of privilege and authority. His ownership of these plants is thus linked to earlier literary representations of the acquisition of strange and exotic items: their presence within royal and imperial palaces showed the power and wealth of the collector. Furthermore, in an allegorical reading of these works, Cao Pi's writings show his appreciation of the talents of others, while the works of the poets he patronized express their delight in finding such a congenial environment. This paper includes an annotated translation of each of the five rhapsodies, a discussion of authenticity and the major textual problems, and shows how each of these pieces interrelates with and complements the others.

Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations

Goethe, Faust, and Motherless Creations Wendy C. Nielsen This essay reads the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe alongside the material culture of motherless creations—the automata and androids that his contemporaries imagined and created. Automata and androids are motherless in the sense that men create them, and they represent an attempt to usurp women’s primary role in reproduction. Examining Goethe’s relationship to the artificial life-forms of his period sheds light not only on the role parentage plays in Faust, a text replete with references to reproduction, but also on the author’s relationship to discursive debates around what contemporaries called Erzeugung, “generation.” This contextualization of Goethe and Faust in the field of artificial life also helps to better explain the peculiar absence of mothers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German writing, a phenomenon that Gail Hart and Susan Gustafson investigate.1 In the Goethezeit, narratives of creation sometimes downplayed women’s contribution to the development of the embryo; debates surged between those who believed in epigenesis, the gradual formation of the fetus, and the preformationists, who argued that viviparous animals existed preformed, either in the sperm (spermists) or in the ovum (ovists).2 This essay argues that Faust II reflects this interest in who contributes more to the creation of new life: the father or the mother. The scene during which Homunculus, a motherless creation, is born satirizes the theory of preformation, if not creation itself.3 Scandinavian scholars have recently pointed out that Goethe’s Homunculus in Faust II relates to the contemporary field of artificial life,4 and Jessica Riskin ties eighteenth-century automata to the philosophical, historical origins of artificial life.5 In The Philosophy of Artificial Life (1996), the premier cognitive science researcher of artificial life, Margaret Boden, defines life as “self-organization, emergence, autonomy, growth, development, reproduction, evolution, adaptation, responsiveness, and metabolism.”6 These terms are, of course, modern; in Goethe’s time, “creationism” substitutes for “evolutionism,” and “vitalism” (translated into Kraft in German)7 for “emergence.”8 Traditionally critics have relied on Goethe’s Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erklären (Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790) to explore his concept of generation, while his writings on morphology further establish the author’s interest in the form and process of creation.9 Generation in Faust I and II is worth reflecting on because life, afterlife, and the redemptive power of love form their thematic core; as Jane [End Page 59] K. Brown’s allegorical reading of the play suggests, the female figures help redeem Faust’s humanity through their love.10 In fact, Faust’s female figures remain vehicles for procreation but never quite inhabit their roles as mothers. Conception, birth, and rebirth in Faust I and II happen by artificial means and follow their own fantastical logic. Faust (whose own mother is never mentioned) meets Gretchen after Easter, and by Walpurgis Night, she has presumably given birth, if her apparition is to be believed, and then she drowns her own nameless, sexless child. Faust needs the help of the mysterious Mothers to reach Helena, but they, like other maternal figures in the play (Gretchen’s mother; the pregnant Bärbel, about whom Lieschen gossips; and Helena’s mother, Leda), never appear onstage, and scholars remain perplexed about their function in the tragedy.11 Helena is already dead but comes to life, and she gives birth to a nearly grown Euphorion mere lines after she meets his father. Euphorion, of course, dies when, like Icarus, he flies too high in the sky. Indeed, as Robert Anchor points out, Faust features the loss of children repeatedly: “Mater Dolorosa, Gretchen’s mother, Gretchen herself, and Helena all lose their offspring to untimely and violent death.”12 In this way, Goethe’s depiction of motherhood in Faust places importance on surrogate motherhood, as Ellis Dye suggests: “Gretchen is identified with Helena and she, in turn, with Galatea and with Galatea’s mother Aphrodite.”13 All these figures stand in for the archetypal vessel of transmutation, the Virgin Mary, who takes on a masculine guise, Doctor Marianus, during Faust’s final ascension into heaven. Thus, Faust points to...

Allegories of Origins: Frankenstein after the Enlightenment

This essay proposes that Mary Shelley’s fictional Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is productively conceived via Enlightenment preoccupations with accounting for origins of humanity, society, and language. The shaking of confidence in the Bible’s account of such origins, beginning in the late seventeenth century, prompted any number of thinkers either to provide an allegorical reading of the Genesis story or to offer an alternative account, without, however, being on firm empirical ground to do so. This essay argues that the creature’s account of the early phases of his life correspond strikingly to narratives of the early origins of humanity in Constantin Francois Volney, William Godwin, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau and that these must be taken into account in deciphering one allegorical strain of this post-Enlightenment fiction.

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

Political Literacy: Gender, Nationalism, and Visibility in African Literary History

The Singularity of Damon Galgut's Small Circle of Beings

SummaryThis article offers a close reading of Damon Galgut's Small Circle of Beings, a novella which attracted little interest upon its initial publication in 1988 and remains one of the most critically neglected works in his oeuvre. I suggest that the novella's neglect sheds light on some of the reading protocols which governed the reception of local writing in the late apartheid years and continue to inform definitions of what “properly” constituted South African literature during this period. I examine a number of key paratexts which attempted to legitimise Small Circle of Beings within the field of anti-apartheid writing, typically by using a “mimetic” or “historicist” conception of allegory which insisted on Galgut's ineluctable submission to his heavily politicised context. In a discussion which takes its cue from Derek Attridge's The Singularity of Literature, I endeavour to “resist the allegorical reading” of Small Circle of Beings in this article and provide an analysis of the novella which preserves, rather than resolves, its many indeterminacies, including its ambiguous chronotope. I suggest, more broadly, that attending to the “singularity” of a novel like Small Circle of Beings enlivens us to the heterogeneity of apartheid-era South African writing, which is often retrospectively defined in monolithic terms.

The Efficacy of Salvation in the Allegorical Reading of Scripture: Learning from Origen

Introduction This article explores the possibility of returning the practice of ancient allegorical interpretation as a resource for developing a post-critical theological reading of Scripture that prioritizes its formative significance for contemporary scriptural readers. What I am after is not the specific theological conclusions proposed within an ancient reading of a scriptural text. Those conclusions are, no doubt, interesting, but often force the comparison between ancient allegorical practice and various modern exegetical strategies in a distracting and unhelpful way. I want instead see allegorical reading as a phenomenon that arises within a set of theological commitments about the impact of scriptural reading--its soteriological efficacy--on the reader. I go about this task in three steps. First, I problematize the contemporary scholarly distinction between and allegory, seeing it as supporting an often unwarranted anxiety about ancient allegorical practice. This anxiety, usually involving the relationship between interpretation and history, presses allegorical readings into a predetermined opposition history in a way that argumentatively begs the question in favor of discreet typological reading. It will be important notice how such modern discreet categories not only obscure the variety of nonliteral reading practices in the ancient period--not noticing how they work together--but also belie certain theological commitments about the efficacy of scriptural reading that gives allegorical forms their force. Second, I take up the discussion of scriptural reading in Erich Auerbach's essay Figura, showing how his theory of figural interpretation both preserves and surpasses the assumptions of the allegory/typology distinction, thus providing a framework that pinpoints the benefits and dangers of nonliteral interpretation. Nevertheless, recognizing Auerbach's hesitance affirm the procedures of the allegorical readings of Origen of Alexandria, the paragon of ancient Christian allegorical interpretation, I turn Origen's theology and his second homily on Genesis explore how his reading strategies depend on a picture of scriptural soteriological efficacy, bringing the ancient writings bear on the contemporary ecclesial formation of the Christian reader. With the help of Henri de Lubac and Karen Jo Torjesen, I argue that Origen's allegorical reading presumes a theological relationship between Scripture and the reader that allows past events preserved in ancient Scripture contribute the contemporary soteriological formation of the reader, thus including the reader into the transformative import of the scriptural text. (1) Allegory and Typology The term [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] has been used since the ancient period and is associated with interpretive strategies that have been questioned and criticized for about just as long. No doubt the origin of its meaning, literally to say something other, (2) has often sparked a suspicion that interpretive uses of allegory do a disservice the meaning of the text under analysis. Yet the Christian incorporation of allegory as a way of reading Scripture has involved a distinct set of questions that attempt determine whether ancient Christian allegorical reading bears direct methodological influence from early Platonic, Gnostic, and Philonic uses of allegorical interpretation. Attempting differentiate between allegory and what has come be called typology (derived from the Latin typologia) has been thought assist modern scholarship on ancient Christian exegesis in differentiating between properly Christian interpretive commitment regarding Scripture and otherwise non-Christian influences that bore on ancient Christian interpretation. One of the first twentieth-century scholars incorporate this distinction, Jean Danielou, attempted discern what in Origen's exegetical writings derived from the Christian tradition and what involved carryover from other non-Christian sources. …