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What’s My Name?: Memory, Identity, and Allegory in the Age of the American Empire

What’s My Name?: Memory, Identity, and Allegory in the Age of the American Empire What's My Name? DOI: 10.2478/abcsj-2013-0008 DAVID BRIAN HOWARD Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), University in Halifax The allegorical poetics of citation on display in the following two texts are the result of research into the alternate history of allegory that has emerged through the twentieth century in the writings of such critics as Walter Benjamin, Craig Owens, and Paul de Man. Beginning with Benjamin's monumental and obsessive accumulation of citations on nineteenth century Paris and the work of the poet Charles Baudelaire, which was intended to form the basis of a book entitled Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth, this new understanding of allegory moved to subvert the traditional assumed superiority of the symbolic mode over the allegorical in the visual and literary arts. Drawing from Benjamin's colleague Theodor W. Adorno, the literary critic Marjorie Perloff argues that this poetics functions as a meaning making machine which stages and enacts a resistance, through the individual poem, "to the larger cultural field of capitalist commodification where language has become merely instrumental." Baudelaire's allegorical poetic response to the postrevolutionary society of 1848, with its bourgeois values of progress and consumerism, was central to conceptualizing the most critical poetic http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American, British and Canadian Studies Journal de Gruyter

What’s My Name?: Memory, Identity, and Allegory in the Age of the American Empire

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Publisher
de Gruyter
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by the
ISSN
1841-964X
DOI
10.2478/abcsj-2013-0008
Publisher site
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Abstract

What's My Name? DOI: 10.2478/abcsj-2013-0008 DAVID BRIAN HOWARD Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), University in Halifax The allegorical poetics of citation on display in the following two texts are the result of research into the alternate history of allegory that has emerged through the twentieth century in the writings of such critics as Walter Benjamin, Craig Owens, and Paul de Man. Beginning with Benjamin's monumental and obsessive accumulation of citations on nineteenth century Paris and the work of the poet Charles Baudelaire, which was intended to form the basis of a book entitled Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth, this new understanding of allegory moved to subvert the traditional assumed superiority of the symbolic mode over the allegorical in the visual and literary arts. Drawing from Benjamin's colleague Theodor W. Adorno, the literary critic Marjorie Perloff argues that this poetics functions as a meaning making machine which stages and enacts a resistance, through the individual poem, "to the larger cultural field of capitalist commodification where language has become merely instrumental." Baudelaire's allegorical poetic response to the postrevolutionary society of 1848, with its bourgeois values of progress and consumerism, was central to conceptualizing the most critical poetic

Journal

American, British and Canadian Studies Journal – de Gruyter

Published: Dec 1, 2012

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