Fredric Jameson’s recent book, Allegory and Ideology, argues that allegory has become a ‘social symptom’, an attempt during moments of historical crisis to represent reality even as that reality, rife with contradictory levels, eludes representation. Mobilising the fourfold medieval system of allegory he first introduced in The Political Unconscious, Jameson traces a formal history of attempts to come to terms with the ‘multiplicities’ and incommensurable levels that emerge within modernity and postmodernity. This article identifies the complexities of Jameson’s understanding of allegory and draws on the brief moments when Jameson references the Anthropocene to argue for an allegorical reading of our contemporary environmental crisis that would allow us to see the problem the Anthropocene names as truly contradictory: at one and the same time, the world we inhabit appears to us as a world of our own making and as a world that has become truly alien to us.
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Althusser, Louis 2014, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, translated by G.M. Goshgarian, London: Verso.
Davis, Heather and Zoe Todd 2017, ‘On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene’, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16, 4: 761–780.
DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019, Allegories of the Anthropocene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Helmling, Steven 2001, The Success and Failure of Fredric Jameson: Writing, the Sublime, and the Dialectic of Critique, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
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Jameson, Fredric 1981, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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Malm, Andreas and Alf Hornborg 2014, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’, Anthropocene Review, 1, 1: 62–69.
Moore, Jason W. 2015, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London: Verso.
Moore, Jason W. (ed.) 2016, Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism, Oakland, CA: PM Press.
Moretti, Franco 2020, ‘Always Allegorize?’, New Left Review, II, 121: 53–64.
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Fredric Jameson’s recent book, Allegory and Ideology, argues that allegory has become a ‘social symptom’, an attempt during moments of historical crisis to represent reality even as that reality, rife with contradictory levels, eludes representation. Mobilising the fourfold medieval system of allegory he first introduced in The Political Unconscious, Jameson traces a formal history of attempts to come to terms with the ‘multiplicities’ and incommensurable levels that emerge within modernity and postmodernity. This article identifies the complexities of Jameson’s understanding of allegory and draws on the brief moments when Jameson references the Anthropocene to argue for an allegorical reading of our contemporary environmental crisis that would allow us to see the problem the Anthropocene names as truly contradictory: at one and the same time, the world we inhabit appears to us as a world of our own making and as a world that has become truly alien to us.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1163 | 207 | 27 |
Full Text Views | 518 | 385 | 2 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 1183 | 856 | 6 |