Symbol & Allegory

A familiar account of modernism in the arts sees a turn from Baroque conventions of allegory (abstract ideas clothed in fragmentary arbitrary pictorial or linguistic signs) to a revolutionary romantic combination of image and content in the symbol, which had a late flowering in the Symbolist movement around 1900. Whether the development is celebrated (Coleridge, New Criticism) or deplored (Benjamin, Paul de Man), few question this historical and explanatory schema, investigate its application outside poetry, or ask what role allegory has played in the art of the ostensibly anti-allegorical nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this course, we will consider neoclassical, romantic, and modern views of allegory, symbolism, and meaning in art.