Disturbing the universal
Subtitle: the persistence of allegory in modernism.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 347
Description: This thesis is a study of the modernist mode of allegory in its literary, philosophical, and theoretical contexts. The first section of the thesis ( Allegory in Theory) is divided into two chapters: Chapter 1 traces how, after the waning of Romanticism, the symbol was deployed, not only at the expense of allegory, but also to buttress a conservative cultural agenda aimed at effecting what Walter Benjamin has described as "the aestheticizing of politics." Through an examination of how Soren Kierkegaard invokes medieval notions of figural interpretation in his critique of nineteenth-century faith and culture, Chapter 2 elaborates the pre-history behind the political theology elaborated in the first.While the present thesis is divided into three discrete parts (the second dedicated to an investigation of Allegory in Prose, the third to Allegory in Verse), I tell the story of modernist allegory by calling upon the interpretative itinerary mapped out by the medieval practice of fourfold scriptural exegesis. As such, the two chapters that make up the first part of the thesis are concerned with the question of method , and in that respect occupy the space that Dante, in his "Letter to Can Grande," attributes to allegory, what Fredric Jameson has described as "the opening up of the text to multiple meanings, to successive re-writings and overwritings." Composed of a single chapter dedicated to James Joyce, the Allegory in Prose section is concerned with the literal level. In the third section (Allegory in Verse), I consider tropology and anagogy . The tropological level of modernist allegory is addressed in Chapters 4 and 5, with reference to the conversion and contemplative practice that Giuseppe Ungaretti elaborates in Il porto sepolto [1916]. The anagogic level is handled in Chapter 6, which also serves as a conclusion. In that chapter, I study how, in his later poetry, the apocalyptic strategy Eugenio Montale adopted in La bufera e altro  [1956] transforms into an empty, yet ghostly, form of eschatology.
Notes: Adviser:  Brian Stock.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1770.