Allegories Of Communication

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Allegories of Writing presents the first full synthesis of allegory theory and literary metamorphosis. It examines the leading themes and the literary transformations of metamorphic narratives. By applying current theories of the text and the subject to metamorphic tales from Homer, Plato, and Apuleius to Keats, Kafka, and Calvino, this book recovers the critical force of metamorphosis in secular Western literature. The author clarifies the cultural history of literary metamorphosis from the perspective of allegory theory. At the core of the study are the connections among Plato's Phaedrus, Apuleius's Golden Ass, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Keats's Lamia. Other primary texts are arranged around this core by their significant participation in the ironic literary deployment of metamorphic devices.

This book discusses the semiotic and ethnographic bases for organizational analysis, including the related fieldwork issues confronting the investigator. It explains the importance of rhetorical-dramaturgic and phenomenological strategies for the study of organizations. The arbitrary and culturally based connections in which organizations abound require an understanding of the particulars of cultural scenes, first observed, later conceptualized through semiotic theory. Organizational Communication includes a series of examples from applied semiotics research in nuclear regulatory policy making, truth telling, regulatory control (by, among others, the police), and risk analysis. These data provide the basis for a critique of the limits of earlier analyses of organizational change, such as those offered by structuralist theories. Dr. Manning concludes with an assessment of the postmodernist ethnographic strategies that have evolved as a response to a larger representational crisis, and of the implications of these strategies for the study of organizational culture.

One aspect of the present paper is to draw out the Adam Smith in Friedrich Hayek. I suggest that common economic talk of market communication, market error and correction, and policy error and correction invokes a spectatorial being and appeals to our sympathy with such being. Behind such common economic talk, I suggest, are implicit allegories wherein an allegorical figure runs a system of superior knowledge, communication, and voluntary cooperation. Theoretical discussions of social error invoke the notion of agent error applied to the allegorical being. Similarly, theoretical talk of social correction invokes the notion of agent correction applied to the allegorical being. The allegory behind such talk is vital and necessary because without it the talk of social or market communication, error, and correction cannot be sustained. Unfolding the allegory clarifies the meaning, limitations, and value of such talk. Making what had been implicit explicit helps economists to avoid overstating their generalizations or making those generalizations sound more precise and accurate than they are. Meanwhile, scholars have pointed out that spectating impartially involves something of a paradox - distant-closeness, or cool-warmth. Concurring, I explore the connections between the features of the allegorical being and the doings of the economic agents. I suggest that the cogency of such theorizing depends on such correspondences, and that they are matters of culture, of both the context within which the theorizing is done and of the context theorized about.

Presenting an innovative, interdisciplinary approach to colonial America's best-known literary genre, Andrew Newman analyzes depictions of reading, writing, and recollecting texts in Indian captivity narratives. While histories of literacy and colonialism have emphasized the experiences of Native Americans, as students in missionary schools or as parties to treacherous treaties, captivity narratives reveal what literacy meant to colonists among Indians. Colonial captives treasured the written word in order to distinguish themselves from their Native captors and to affiliate with their distant cultural communities. Their narratives suggest that Indians recognized this value, sometimes with benevolence: repeatedly, they presented colonists with books. In this way and others, Scriptures, saintly lives, and even Shakespeare were introduced into diverse experiences of colonial captivity. What other scholars have understood more simply as textual parallels, Newman argues instead may reflect lived allegories, the identification of one's own unfolding story with the stories of others. In an authoritative, wide-ranging study that encompasses the foundational New England narratives, accounts of martyrdom and cultural conversion in New France and Mohawk country in the 1600s, and narratives set in Cherokee territory and the Great Lakes region during the late eighteenth century, Newman opens up old tales to fresh, thought-provoking interpretations.

"Thinking Allegory Otherwise is a unique collection of essays by allegory specialists and other scholars who engage allegory in exciting new ways." "Not limited to an examination of literary texts and works of art, the essays focus on a wide range of topics, including architecture, philosophy, theater, science, and law. Indeed, all language is allegorical. This collection proves the truth of this statement, but more importantly, it shows the consequences of it. To think allegory otherwise is to think otherwise-forcing us to rethink not only the idea of allegory itself, but also the law and its execution, the literality offigurative abstraction, and the figurations upon which even hard science depends." --Book Jacket.

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, was presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e). All three are characterized in relation to dialectic at the end of Books VII and VIII (531d–534e). Plato has Socrates describe a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them, and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality.

The Trilogia della vita (Trilogy of Life) is a series of three films that Pier Paolo Pasolini completed before his horrifying assassination in 1975, and it remains among the most controversial of his cinematic works. In Allegories of Contamination Patrick Rumble provides an incisive critical and theoretical study of these films and the Marxist filmmaker's complex, original concept of the cinematic medium. With the three films that make up the Trilogy of Life – The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, andThe Arabian Nights – Pasolini attempts to recapture the aura surrounding popular, predominantly oral forms of storytelling through a pro-modern vision of innocent, unalienated bodies and pleasures. In these works Pasolini appears to abandon the explicitly political engagement that marked his earlier works - films that led him to be identified with other radical filmmakers such as Bellocchio, Bertolucci, and Godard. However, Pasolini insisted that these were his 'most ideological films,' and his political engagement translates into a mannerist, anti-classical style or what he called a 'cinema of poetry.' Rumble offers a comparative study based on the concept of 'aesthetic contamination,' which is fundamental to the understanding of Pasolini's poetics. Aesthetic contamination concerns the mediation between different cultures and different historical moments. Through stylistic experimentation, the Trilogy of Life presents a genealogy of visual codes, an interrogation of the subjectivity of narrative cinema. In these films Pasolini celebrates life, and perhaps therein lies their simple heresy.

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.