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Why Medieval Allegory?

Why Medieval Allegory? bernardo sarmiento hinojosa A review of Katharine Breen, Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Nicolette Zeeman, The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Cited in the text as MM and AD, respectively. Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief after- word to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.” Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneu- tics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representa- tion. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary mean- ing but delivers multiplicity and disruption: qui parle Vol. 30, No. 2, December 2021 doi 10.1215/10418385-9395345 © 2021 Editorial Board, Qui Parle 422 qui parle december 2021 vol. 30 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences University of Nebraska Press

Why Medieval Allegory?

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Publisher
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright
Copyright © Editorial Board, Qui Parle
ISSN
1938-8020

Abstract

bernardo sarmiento hinojosa A review of Katharine Breen, Machines of the Mind: Personification in Medieval Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021) and Nicolette Zeeman, The Arts of Disruption: Allegory and “Piers Plowman” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). Cited in the text as MM and AD, respectively. Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief after- word to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.” Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneu- tics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representa- tion. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary mean- ing but delivers multiplicity and disruption: qui parle Vol. 30, No. 2, December 2021 doi 10.1215/10418385-9395345 © 2021 Editorial Board, Qui Parle 422 qui parle december 2021 vol. 30

Journal

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences – University of Nebraska Press

Published: Jan 6, 2022

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