Summary
Federic Jameson: Allegory and Ideology
Allegory and Ideology is a capital work in which the famous American literary theorist advocates the revitalization of allegory as a dialectical approach to the interpretation of cultural products. Based on the methodological roots of Origen's four-level model of allegory and Gremasian semiotics drawn through the prism of Marxism and psychoanalysis, Jameson develops an interpretation model by means of which he locates and exhausts the heterogeneous meanings reflected in each text. From the literal level to interpretation codes, from individual history to collective history, all these trajectories intersect in a work whose inherent historicity is sought to be exposed. Jameson pays attention not only to classical allegorical works (Divine Comedy, Fairy Queen, Faust), but also looks for an allegorical structure in Shakespeare's Hamlet, Mahler's Sixth Symphony, postmodern novel and novel of the Third World. The universal allegorization advocated by Jameson is not just an interpretive whim, but a reflection of a theoretical need in the contemporary postmodern world of multinational capitalism, where the multiplication of narratives requires a critical gesture of totalization. This book is therefore the culmination of critical and theoretical efforts that the author began in the eighties, in an effort to understand the culture of late capitalism.
About the author:
Fredric Jameson is an American literary theorist and Marxist, professor emeritus at Duke University in the USA. So far, he has published several dozen books, among others The Political Unconscious: Storytelling as a Socio-Symbolic Act and Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
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