Allegories Of America

Allegories of America offers a bold idea of what, in terms of political theory, it means to be American. Beginning with the question What do we want from a theory of politics? Dolan explores the metaphysics of American-ness and stops along the way to reflect on John Winthrop, the Constitution, 1950s behavioralist social science, James Merrill, and William Burroughs. The pressing problem, in Dolan's view, is how to find a vocabulary for politics in the absence of European metaphysics. American political thinkers, he suggests, might respond by approaching their own theories as allegories. The postmodern dilemma of the loss of traditional absolutes would thus assume the status of a national mythology—America's perennial identity crisis in the absence of a tradition establishing the legitimacy of its founding. After examining the mid-Atlantic sermons of John Winthrop, the spiritual founding father, Dolan reflects on the authority of the Constitution and the Federalist. He then takes on questions of representation in Cold War ideology, focusing on the language of David Easton and other liberal political "behaviorists," as well as on cold War cinema and the coverage of international affairs by American journalists. Additional discussions are inspired by Hannah Arendt's recasting of political theory in a narrative framework. here Dolan considers two starkly contrasting postwar literary figures—William S. Burroughs and James Merrill—both of whom have a troubled relationship to politics but nonetheless register an urgent need to articulate its dangers and opportunities. Alongside Merrill's unraveling of the distinction between the serious and the fictive, Dolan assesses the attempt in Arendt's On Revolution to reclaim fictional devices for political reflection.

Allegory in America surveys the history of American allegorical writing from the Puritans through the period of American romanticism to postmodernism. In a series of theoretical chapters the cultural function of allegory is discussed in relation to the mythology of American exceptionalism. Each theoretical chapter is followed by a chapter that analyzes a specific text or group of texts. Allegorical indeterminacy is seen to produce a literary tradition that both represents and subverts the ideals of American orthodoxy.

Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.

" 'A camera in the hand and ideas in the head' was the primary axiom of the young originators of Brazil's Cinema Novo. This movement of the 1960s and early 1970s overcame technical constraints and produced films on minimal budgets. In Allegories of Underdevelopment, Ismail Xavier examines a number of these films, arguing that they served to represent a nation undergoing a political and social transformation into modernity. Its best-known voice, filmmaker Glauber Rocha claimed that Cinema Novo was driven by an "aesthetics of hunger." This scarcity of means demanded new cinematic approaches that eventually gave rise to a legitimate and unique Third World cinema. Xavier stands in the vanguard of scholars presenting and interpreting these revolutionary films - from the masterworks of Rocha to the groundbreaking experiments of Julio Bressane, Rogério Sganzerla, Andrea Tonacci and Arthur Omar - to an English-speaking audience. Focusing on each filmmaker's use of narrative allegories for the "conservative modernization" Brazil and other nations underwent in the 1960s and 1970s, Xavier asks questions relating to the connection between film and history. He examines the way Cinema Novo transformed Brazil's cultural memory and charts the controversial roles that Marginal Cinema and Tropicalism played in this process. Among the films he discusses are Black God, White Devil, Land in Anguish, Red Light Bandit, Macunaíma, Antônio das Mortes, The Angel Is Born, and Killed the Family and Went to the Movies." -- Book cover.

Ask anyone the world over to identify a figure in buckskins with a feather bonnet, and the answer will be “Indian.” Many works of art produced by non-Native artists have reflected such a limited viewpoint. In American Indians in British Art, 1700–1840, Stephanie Pratt explores for the first time an artistic tradition that avoided simplification and that instead portrayed Native peoples in a surprisingly complex light. During the eighteenth century, the British allied themselves with Indian tribes to counter the American colonial rebellion. In response, British artists produced a large volume of work focusing on American Indians. Although these works depicted their subjects as either noble or ignoble savages, they also represented Indians as active participants in contemporary society. Pratt places artistic works in historical context and traces a movement away from abstraction, where Indians were symbols rather than actual people, to representational art, which portrayed Indians as actors on the colonial stage. But Pratt also argues that to view these images as mere illustrations of historical events or individuals would be reductive. As works of art they contain formal characteristics and ideological content that diminish their documentary value.

This book argues that popular feminist fiction provided a key means by which American culture narrated and negotiated the perceived breakdown of American progress after the 1960s. It explores the intersection of two key features of late twentieth-century American culture.

The only form of monumental artistic expression practiced from antiquity to the Enlightenment, allegory evolved to its fullest complexity in Dante's Commedia and Spenser's Faerie Queene. Drawing on a wide range of literary, visual, and critical works in the European tradition, Gordon Teskey provides both a literary history of allegory and a theoretical account of the genre which confronts fundamental questions about the violence inherent in cultural forms. Approaching allegory as the site of intense ideological struggle, Teskey argues that the desire to raise temporal experience to ever higher levels of abstraction cannot be realized fully but rather creates a "rift" that allegory attempts to conceal. After examining the emergence of allegorical violence from the gendered metaphors of classical idealism, Teskey describes its amplification when an essentially theological form of expression was politicized in the Renaissance by the introduction of the classical gods, a process leading to the replacement of allegory by political satire and cartoons. He explores the relationship between rhetorical voice and forms of indirect speech (such as irony) and investigates the corporeal emblematics of violence in authors as different as Machiavelli and Yeats. He considers the large organizing theories of culture, particularly those of Eliot and Frye, which take the place in the modern world of earlier allegorical visions. Concluding with a discussion of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Teskey describes Spenser's metaphysical allegory, which is deconstructed by its own invocation of genealogical struggle, as a prophetic vision and a form of warning.