Thinking Allegory Otherwise

"Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways." "Not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, the essays focus on a wide range of topics, including architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. Indeed, all language is allegorical. This collection proves the truth of this statement, but more importantly, it shows the consequences of it. To think allegory otherwise is to think otherwise-forcing us to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality offigurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends." --Book Jacket.

This book proposes that allegory is not a species of literature but a structure of reading applied to uncomfortable juxtapositions within literary texts. Examples from centuries of response to English Renaissance narrative poetry show not what poems mean but how they may be read and what cultural conditions encourage allegorical or nonallegorical readings. The study also encompasses interpretations of classical verse, biblical parable, Jacobean masque, modern lyric, and television advertising to explore how texts move in and out of the category of allegory.

What is a person? What company do people keep with animals, plants, and things? Such questions—bearing fundamentally on the shared meaning of politics and life—animate Shakespearean drama, yet their urgency has often been obscured. Julia Reinhard Lupton gently dislodges Shakespeare’s plays from their historical confines to pursue their universal implications. From Petruchio’s animals and Kate’s laundry to Hamlet’s friends and Caliban’s childhood, Lupton restages thinking in Shakespeare as an embodied act of consent, cure, and care. Thinking with Shakespeare encourages readers to ponder matters of shared concern with the playwright by their side. Taking her cue from Hannah Arendt, Lupton reads Shakespeare for fresh insights into everything from housekeeping and animal husbandry to biopower and political theology.

Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives collects some of the most compelling current work in allegory studies, by an international team of researchers in a range of disciplines and specializations in the humanities and cognitive sciences. The volume tracks the subject across disciplinary, cultural, and period-based divides, from its shadowy origins to its uncertain future, and from the rich variety of its cultural and artistic manifestations to its deep cognitive roots. Allegory is everything we already know it to be: a mode of literary and artistic composition, and a religious as well as secular interpretive practice. As this volume attests, however, it is much more than that—much more than a sum of its parts. Collectively, the phenomena we now subsume under this term comprise a dynamic cultural force which has left a deep imprint on our history, whose full impact we are only beginning to comprehend, and which therefore demands precisely such dedicated cross-disciplinary examination as this book seeks to provide.

Jacques Derrida remains a leading voice of philosophy, his works still resonating today—and for more than three decades, one of the main sites of Derridean deconstruction has been the arts. Collecting nineteen texts spanning from 1979 to 2004, Thinking out of Sight brings to light Derrida’s most inventive ideas about the making of visual artworks. The book is divided into three sections. The first demonstrates Derrida’s preoccupation with visibility, image, and space. The second contains interviews and collaborations with artists on topics ranging from the politics of color to the components of painting. Finally, the book delves into Derrida’s writings on photography, video, cinema, and theater, ending with a text published just before his death about his complex relationship to his own image. With many texts appearing for the first time in English, Thinking out of Sight helps us better understand the critique of representation and visibility throughout Derrida’s work, and, most importantly, to assess the significance of his insights about art and its commentary.

The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries

"Aside from its perfect fit of critic and subject, Laurence A. Rickels's book provides the most thorough and exhaustive reading of Philip K. Dick's literary work that exists. He goes through all the novels literally, both the science fiction works and the so-called mainstream novels Dick did not publish in his lifetime. The reader of science fiction should welcome a book like this, which is both knowledgeable of the SF tradition tradition and creatively analytical. I could not put this book down once I began to read it".---George Slusser, University of California, Riverside --

This book offers the first multidisciplinary analysis of the "wordless novels" of American woodcut artist and illustrator Lynd Ward (1905–1985), who has been enormously influential in the development of the contemporary graphic novel. The study examines his six pictorial novels, each part of an evolving experiment in a new form of visual narrative that offers a keen intervention in the cultural and sexual politics of the 1930s. The novels form a discrete group – much like Beethoven’s piano sonatas or Keats’s great odes – in which Ward evolves a unique modernist style (cinematic, expressionist, futurist, realist, documentary) and grapples with significant cultural and political ideas in a moment when the American experiment and capitalism itself hung in the balance. In testing the limits of a new narrative form, Ward’s novels require a versatile critical framework as sensitive to German Expressionism and Weimar cinema as to labor politics and the new energies of proletarian homosexuality.