The Symbiotic Relationship of the Heart and the Mind (English Version) (original) (raw)

The Hidden Power of the Allegory

The allegory is too often dismissed as an artificial literary device.At leat one critic admits that allegories arise spontaneously and the consequence of their generation are not subject to the full control of the conscious mind . In the case of inquiries concerning the paperback version of this document please use the message facility indicated by an envelope

Allegories of knowing and the desire for meaning

2015

I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but since a fine paining is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is the painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy. — Charles Baudelaire, “What is the Good of Criticism?” 1

Redefining Allegory: The Meaning of Allegory Now CALL FOR PAPERS

Even after “allegory studies” develops as a discipline in its own right, what allegory is and what allegory means is still a contentious issue. This conference aims to address 20th century and contemporary theoretical applications for allegory, most notably in the work of Walter Benjamin and Paul De Man, and contrast them with the voices of scholars who consider this allegory a misinterpretation of a historically bound category.

Allegory and symbol - a fundamental opposition?

Language and Literature

For the last 200 years in literary aesthetics a radical opposition has been drawn between allegory and symbol, though no opposition like this was drawn previously. Allegory has generally been regarded as inferior to symbol, supposedly being arbitrary and mechanical where symbol was motivated and imaginative. Although more recently post-structuralists have praised allegory over symbol, they have still believed that it is radically arbitrary. In fact, allegory and symbol are both large-scale expressions of conceptual metaphor and as such are both equally motivated and equally suggestive in meaning. The illusion of a radical opposition between them is to be explained by the ideological self-interest of literary and artistic intellectuals.