Allegory and Ideology

Resumen del libro

This major new work by Fredric Jameson is not a book about method, but it does propose a dialectic capable of holding together in one breath the heterogeneities that reflect our biological individualities, our submersion in collective history and class struggle, and our alienation to a disembodied new world of information and abstraction. Eschewing the arid secularities of philosophy, Walter Benjamin once recommended the alternative of the rich figurality of an older theology; in that spirit we here return to the antiquated Ptolemaic systems of ancient allegory and its multiple levels (a proposal first sketched out in The Political Unconscious); it is tested against the epic complexities of the overtly allegorical works of Dante, Spenser and the Goethe of Faust II, as well as symphonic form in music, and the structure of the novel, postmodern as well as Third World (about which a controversial essay on national allegory is here reprinted with a theoretical commentary); and an allegorical history of emotion is meanwhile rehearsed from its contemporary, geopolitical context.

Biografía del autor

Jameson, the William A. Lane Jr. is Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of Romance Studies at Duke University.<br>Jameson received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1959 and taught at Harvard, Yale, and the University of California before going to Duke in 1985. He is the author of Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991, which won the MLA Lowell Award), Seeds of Time (1994), Brecht and Method (1998), The Cultural Turn (1998), and A Singular Modernity (2002). His recent works include Archaeologies of the Future (2005) and The Modernist Papers (2007). He received the 2008 Holberg Prize for his scholarship.