XPost: alt.books.cs-lewis, rec.arts.books, alt.usage.english
XPost: alt.english.usage, alt.religion.christianity
From: jerry_friedman@yahoo.com
On 5/17/16 12:22 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
> On Tue, 17 May 2016 07:53:01 -0600, Jerry Friedman
> wrote:
>
>> On 5/17/16 2:35 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> Save the Allegory!
>>>
>>> An entire literary tradition is being forgotten because writers use
>>> the term allegory to mean, like, whatever they want.
>>>
>>> By Laura Miller
>>>
>>> I’m not much of a language stickler. I roll my eyes when people argue
>>> over the Oxford comma, and I couldn’t care less when someone says they
>>> “could care less.” As a descriptivist (rather than a prescriptivist),
>>> I’m mostly OK with seeing the meaning of words evolve and transform
>>> over time, because that’s what a living language does.
>> ...
>>
>> Very daring to copy that into a.u.e.
>
> I think it's now several years since I saw discussions about that on
> aue, but when I did, I think the descriptivists outnumbered the
> prescriptivists.
Still probably true. See the thread on "other than".
>>> What people usually mean when they call something an allegory today is
>>> that the fictional work in question can function as a metaphor for
>>> some real-world situation or event. This is a common arts journalist’s
>>> device: finding a political parallel to whatever you happen to be
>>> reviewing is a handy way to make it appear worth writing about in the
>>> first place. Calling that parallel an allegory serves to make the
>>> comparison more forceful. Fusion says that Batman v Superman is a
>>> “none-too-subtle allegory for the fight between Republican
>>> presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.” (It is not.) The
>>> Hollywood Reporter calls Zootopia an “accidental anti-Trump
>>> allegory”—this despite the fact that there is no literary form less
>>> accidental than allegory. The meaning of the word has drifted so far
>>> that even works that aren’t especially metaphorical get labeled as
>>> allegory: A film about artistic repression in Iran is a “clunky
>>> allegory” for ... artistic repression in Iran.
>>
>> She's got a point there. I also dislike the idea that calling a fantasy
>> or science fiction story an allegory makes it respectable somehow.
>
> I think she goes too far, but agree with her point about many people
> going too far the other way, and calling things allegories that are
> not allegories at all.
>
> I disagree with her when she says that allegories can only be about
> abstract qualities that are personified. I think allegories can also
> be about people and events in the world. I don't think it's wrong to
> call "Animal Farm" an allegory, for instance.
I like Traddict's suggestion that it's a roman à clef. Do you consider
that a subcategory of allegory?
>>> Allegory or metaphor: The distinction might seem obscure and academic
>>> to many readers. Shouldn’t allegory be grateful to get any attention
>>> at all? Isn’t it just an archaic literary mode that nobody uses
>>> anymore? Yes and no. About the only people creating true allegories
>>> today are political cartoonists. But a culture never entirely discards
>>> its roots, and allegory, which first appeared in the waning years of
>>> the Roman Empire,
>>
>> Ahem. See for example Plato's /Republic/, Psalm 80, and Ezekiel 16-17.
>
> I think allegory was popular back then, though, and all sorts of
> non-allegorical works were given allegorical interretations.
Such as the Song of Songs? That's still no reason to say that late
Roman times are when allegory first appeared, though. In my opinion.
--
Jerry Friedman
"No Trump" bridge-themed political shirts: cafepress.com/jerrysdesigns
Bumper stickers ditto: cafepress/jerrysstickers
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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