American Allegories
Fall 2009, Thursday 1:40-4:30, LC302
Dr. Joseph Murphy, Office: SF229, Email: 041845@mail.fju.edu.tw
Overview. An allegory is a story that signifies on two or more levels. The term derives
from the Greek allos (“other”) and agoreuein (“to speak publicly”): allegory conceals an
“other” narrative behind the surface one, to communicate with a public who must
uncover the hidden level. Since the classical period, allegory has served to convey
religious and political meanings considered too abstract or too sensitive for direct
statement. For this reason, it has proven a popular mode in the literature of the United
States, where visions of religious and political destiny have shaped national identity and
expanded the significance of everyday events.
Beginning with selected background readings from two classic Old World allegories—
Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308-21) and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)—
this course will examine American allegories of the Puritan, Romantic, Modern, and
Postmodern periods. Texts will include short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar
Allen Poe, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1891), short stories by Flannery
O’Connor, Sherwood Anderson’s “Godliness” (1919), Willa Cather’s short story
collection Obscure Destinies (1932); Cormac McCarthy’s recent post-apocalyptic novel
The Road (2006); and theories of allegory by Dante, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Walter
Benjamin, and Northrop Frye. The course’s unifying themes will be: the operation of
allegory (and related techniques like personification and typology) in American literature;
the distinction between allegory and symbolism, a device generally favored over allegory
since the Romantic period; and the adaptation of allegory to modern and postmodern
literary forms..
Texts
Students are responsible for acquiring the following books:
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Tales. Norton Critical Edition. ISBN: 0393954269. Available
now at Bookman Books, Taipei.
Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor. Any reliable edition is acceptable, as long as all
students acquire the same edition.
Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories. (Farrar) ISBN: 0374515360.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road. (Vintage) ISBN 9780307277923. A new edition, to tie in
with the film adaptation, is due out in September: ISBN-10: 0307476308; ISBN-13: 9780307476302.
2
Requirements and Grading
Presentation and class participation
Written commentaries
Review essay
Essay
20%
20%
20%
40%
One presentation. 20 min. Give a presentation, using PowerPoint slides, on one of the
assigned scholarly articles or theoretical texts (to be announced). Email the PowerPoint
presentation to all seminar members after class.
Class participation. Read and prepare the texts assigned for each class meeting before
the beginning of class. We will spend most of our class time reading and analyzing
fiction together. Come to every class prepared to comment on some specific passage from
the primary reading for that day. In addition, twice during the semester each student will
write a short commentary (about 500 words, single spaced and formatted on one side of a
page) on a passage from the fiction for that day, make copies for all class members, and
read it to the class as a basis for questions and discussion. Commentaries must be
emailed to all class members by 12 midnight on the evening prior to the
presentation.
Writing assignments
--Two short commentaries (about 500 words each, single spaced and formatted on one
side of a page), distributed to the class (see “Class Participation” above)
--Essay (10-12 pages) developing an original argument concerning the allegorical
dimensions of one or more works of fiction from the course.
Recommended Theoretical Works
Benjamin, Walter. “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.” Reflections. Ed. Peter
Demetz. 146-62.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “From Allegories to Novels.” Other Inquisitions. Trans. Ruth L. C.
Simms. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964. 154-57.
Dante. From “Epistle to Can Grande.” 2008. 8 Aug. 2009 <http://www.westernciv.com/
greatminds/dante/danteallegory.shtml>.
Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP,
1964. 1-23.
Frye, Northrop. From “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols. Anatomy of Criticism.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. 71-128.
Keller, Karl. “Aleph, Zahirs, and the Triumph of Ambiguity: Typology in NineteenthCentury American Literature.” Literary Uses of Typology. Ed. Earl Miner.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1977. 274-314.
3
Landow, George. “Ruskin and Nineteenth-Century Attitudes toward Allegory.” The
Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin. 26 July 2005. 8 Aug. 2009
<http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/ruskin/atheories/5.1.html>.
Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love. New York: Oxford UP, 1985. Excerpts.
Lukacs, Georg. From “The Ideology of Modernism.” The Meaning of Contemporary
Realism. Trans. John and Necke Mander. London: Merlin, 1963. 17-46.
Murrin, Michael. “The Theory of Allegory”; “The Auditor’s Response: The
Interpretation of Allegory.” The Veil of Allegory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1969.
54-74, 98-143.
Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1979. Excerpts.
Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” Beyond
Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture. Ed. Scott Bryson et al.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. 52-69.
Pensky, Max. “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectical Images.” The Cambridge
Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2004. 177-198.
Schedule
Date
Readings and Assignments
9/17 Introduction
9/24 Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”; Dante, Divine Comedy (selections); Plato,
“Allegory of the Cave” (from The Republic)
10/01 Hawthorne, “The Birthmark,” “The Celestial Rail-road”; Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s
Progress (selections)
10/08 Hawthorne, “Young Goodman Brown”; “The Man of Adamant”
10/15 Hawthorne, “Roger Malvin’s Burial”; Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”
10/22 Hawthorne, “Ethan Brand”
10/29 Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor
11/05 Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor
11/12 Anderson, “Godliness” (from Winesburg, Ohio)
11/19 Cather, Obscure Destinies (“Neighbour Rosicky”); “Double Birthday”
11/26 Cather, Obscure Destinies (“Old Mrs. Harris,” “Two Friends”)
12/03 O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Artificial Nigger”
12/10 O’Connor, “Good Country People,” “The Displaced Person”
12/17 O’Connor, “Greenleaf,” “A View of the Woods”
12/24 O’Connor, “Revelation,” “Parker’s Back”
12/31 McCarthy, The Road
1/07 McCarthy, The Road
1/14 McCarthy, The Road
1/18 Essay due, 4 p.m. Dr. Murphy’s dept. mailbox