Resumen de (Re)facing Prosopopeia and Allegory in Contemporary Theory and Iconography
The writer discusses the contribution of four texts to the revitalization of the history of personification and allegory in philosophy, literary criticism, and art history. The theorization of personification and allegory is still little represented in the scholarly publication record. However, four recent books—Allegory and Violence by Gordon Teskey; Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal by Vicki Kirby; Ideology and Inscription: Cultural Studies After Benjamin, De Man, and Bakhtin by Tom Cohen; and Mirror in Parchment: The Lutrell Psalter and the Making of Medieval England by Michael Camille—treat allegory and personification as central topics, paying aggressive and direct attention to either the traditional vocabularies of allegory or its truly radical meanings in a number of scholarly lexicons. The writer examines the contributions made by these works, concluding that they bring the needed language of a new materialism—a more self-aware rhetorical materialism—to a subject too long dominated by idealist sentiments and vocabularies.
