Thinking allegory otherwise

290 Pages·2010·2.21 MB·English

by  Machosky

Thinking Allegory Otherwise

Thinking Allegory
Otherwise
Edited by Brenda Machosky
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights
reserved.
This book has been published with the assistance of The Stanford Fund, The Office of the
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and The School of Humanities and Sciences
at Stanford University.
Essay One was originally published in boundary2, volume 3, no. 1 (Spring). Copyright,
Duke University Press. Reprinted with permission.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University
Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thinking allegory otherwise / edited by Brenda Machosky.
p. cm.
Originates from a conference held at Stanford University in February 2005.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8047-6380-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Allegory—Congresses. I. Machosky, Brenda.
PN56.A5T49 2010
809'.915—dc22
2009028684
Typeset by Thompson Type in 11/14 Adobe Garamond.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Contributors ix
Introduction 1
“A Protean Device”
brenda machosky
1. Allegory without Ideas 9
angus j. s. fletcher
part one performing allegory
2. Memories and Allegories of the Death Penalty 37
Back to the Medieval Future?
jody enders
3. The Mask of Copernicus and the Mark of the Compass 60
Bruno, Galileo, and the Ontology of the Page
daniel selcer
4. The Function of Allegory in Baroque Tragic Drama 87
What Benjamin Got Wrong
blair hoxby
part two allegory in place
5. Colonial Allegories in Paris 119
The Ideology of Primitive Art
gordon teskey
6. Monuments and Space as Allegory 142
Town Planning Proposals in Eighteenth-Century Paris
richard wittman
vi contents
part three revisiting allegory in the
renaissance
7. Allegory and Female Agency 163
maureen quilligan
8. What Knights Really Want 188
stephen orgel
9. Eliding Absence and Regaining Presence 208
The Materialist Allegory of Good and Evil in Bacon’s
Fables and Milton’s Epic
catherine gimelli martin
part four new dimensions for allegory
10. On Vitality, Figurality, and Orality in Hannah Arendt 237
karen feldman
11. Allegory and Science 249
From Euclid to the Search for Fundamental Structures
in Modern Physics
james j. paxson
Index 265
Acknowledgments
A collection such as this depends on the good will of many people and the
generous support of many others. This collection is the sequel to a con-
ference of the same name. Stanford University President John Hennessy
provided financial support for the conference and this publication through
The Stanford Fund. Generous funding was also provided by John Bravman,
Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, and Arnold Rampersad, Cog-
nizant Dean of the Humanities. In the Office of the President, I would like
to thank Jeffrey Wachtel, Senior Assistant to the President, for his support
of this project. The Stanford Humanities Center, then under the direction
of John Bender, provided an intellectually pleasant atmosphere for the orig-
inal conference. My colleagues, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Robert Har-
rison, encouraged this project and helped bring it to fruition. At Stanford
University, this project has also received support from the Division of Lit-
eratures, Cultures, and Languages; the Departments of French and Italian,
Comparative Literature, and English; The Philosophical Reading Group;
The Program in Continuing Studies; The Introduction to the Humanities
Program; and Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities. The conference
and this book would not have proceeded so smoothly without the help of
Monica Moore, Ruth Kaplan, and Ryan Zurowski. Thanks also to the re-
viewers, including Bruce T. Clarke, who provided insightful comments on
the final organization and production of this collection. I am particularly
grateful to Norris Pope and the editorial staff at Stanford University Press,
who have provided kind and helpful guidance through this process. I owe
especial thanks to the contributors of the volume. These scholars have made
my editing job easy and pleasant. I appreciate their patience with me, their
enthusiasm for this work, and their continued commitment to thinking
allegory otherwise.

Contributors
jody ender s is a past editor of Theatre Survey and is the author of
numerous articles and four books on the interplay of rhetoric, literature,
performance theory, law, and the theatrical culture of the European Middle
Ages, among them Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends
(Chicago, 2002, and winner of the Barnard Hewitt Award) and Murder
by Accident: Medieval Theater, Modern Media, Critical Intentions (Chicago,
2009). She is Professor of French and Theater at the University of Califor-
nia, Santa Barbara.
a ngus fl etcher is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, CUNY
Graduate School. Author of several books and articles on literary theory
and history, he published A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy,
Environment, and the Future of Imagination (Harvard, 2004), which won
the Truman Capote Prize. In 2007, Harvard published his book, Time,
Space and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare. In 2008, he served as J. Paul
Getty Research Professor, Los Angeles. Currently he is finishing a book on
change and complexity as these occur in the arts and sciences, particularly
focusing on the works of Joseph Conrad, Thomas Mann, Karel Capek, and
J. G. Ballard.
bl a ir hox by, Associate Professor of English at Stanford University,
is the author of Mammon’s Music: Literature and Economics in the Age of
Milton (Yale, 2002). His recent research has focused on early modern trag-
edy, opera, and allegorical drama. His forthcoming Spectacles of the Gods:
Tragedy and Tragic Opera, 1550–1780 reconstructs a set of deep assumptions
and performance practices that cross national boundaries and makes the
early modern period a distinct and meaningful time-section in the history
of theater.