Title: Allegraphy and The Faerie Queene’s Significantly Unsignifying Ecology
Abstract: This essay undertakes two tasks. First, it suggests that the narrative elements within an allegorical text (here, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene ) that do not participate in the allegory might rather belong to an expressive mode related to but distinct from the allegorical. I call this mode the “allegraphical”; while allegory depends on multivalent signification, allegraphy celebrates episodes of resistance to the imposition of such conceits. Second, this essay explores three such allegraphical phenomena within The Faerie Queene . These case studies—focusing on a woman, a horse, and a topographical feature—refuse to signify allegorically, instead maintaining their own subject-making literality. Their allegraphical labors outline an ecological hermeneutic—an interpretive practice that acknowledges the meaning-making possibility of a text’s interconnected elements when they refuse to be conceptually instrumentalized.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-03-06
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 4
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