It was always about Marx and Freud: yesterday’s form, no doubt, of the age-old philosophical antinomy: mind/body, idealism/realism, base/superstructure, in a situation in which the opposition, the gap or break, reappears again within each term. The base has its own base/superstructure problem within itself, as does the mind: there is an interminable scaling at work, a fission, whose unimaginable end-terms are nothingness and infinity. (Even in Freud there is an obvious base and superstructure in the form of the Unconscious and its consciousness, while the latter is equally divided between itself and its unconscious ‘base’ in the super-ego.)
The difference is that the older theoretical assaults on this ‘correlationism’ (when they did not simply suppress one term of the other) had as their aim identity, or some ultimate reunification of these terms; while the contemporary – dare one say postmodern? – effort brandishes the gap in defiance and wears absolute difference as a badge of conquest: not mediation but the incommensurable (a term oddly and presciently underscored on the first page of Lukács’s essay on Faust II, see below).
As for Marx and Freud, however, the intellectuals of that working-class movement called Marxism found the maladies and complaints of Freud’s well-to-do Viennese clients alien to them (except for Wilhelm Reich, who grasped the political meaning of a connection between sexual repression and social ‘subalternity’). The major avant-garde party theoreticians however – Lukács and Gramsci – detested psychoanalysis, which will only gradually make its way into the Western Marxism of Horkheimer’s group via Erich Fromm, and on the promise of its resources for analysis of the collective ‘authoritarianism’ of the triumphant fascist movement. The enduring glory of the Surrealists lies in their open espousal of both these unities-of-theory-and-practice (ignored, or if you prefer repressed, in the then official academic disciplines); but they were not much interested in theories of their relationship: like ‘subject-positions’, in practice you could be both at the same time, along with various other identities, practicing all of them in their own ways (doing automatic writing, joining the party). But in theory, each side seemed to be too orthodox to tolerate the negotiations required for an official marriage. It was not until the post-war period that the chances for union improved, and that the desire called ‘Freudo-Marxist’ began to be named and experimentally theorized. I want to chart the course of these experiments with a view to clarifying my own belated contribution here. I will tell that story in three stages.
The first is the seductive and impossible vision of a Freudo-Marxism in which the findings of a science of subjectivity are systemically coordinated with those of a science of modes of production (or at least of capitalism). Many useful and stimulating insights and suggestions have arisen from these experiments (much as chemistry emerged from alchemy), but my feeling is that it is better to satisfy such ambitions at the level of subject-positions (in other words, to be content to be a Freudian as well as being a Marxist, and being many other things as well) rather than to strive for the kind of grand philosophical system which philosophy itself had to relinquish after Hegel. Such systems inevitably presuppose this or that belief in human nature, if not in nature itself; beliefs we can no longer seriously entertain (it would even be old-fashioned to add: after the death of God).
The second possibility, in which the levels for the first time appear in person, was that of Lucien Goldmann’s homologies: it was Goldmann’s bold reinvention of a Marxian cultural and literary analysis in France (after Stalin) that placed the matter of the levels back on the agenda. I will not indulge here in any extensive analysis of the triumphs and failures of Goldmann’s ambitious enterprise, except to solicit our admiration for it and for him. Goldmann’s monumental The Hidden God (1955)[1] posited a “homology” between the works of Pascal and Racine and the mentality of that segment of the French seventeenth-century social order called the noblesse de robe (wealthy families who bought their way into a nominal aristocracy by way of judicial and parliamentary positions). At once, then, the originality of Goldmann’s practice of the Marxist tradition is apparent: he began to work here with class fractions rather than with classes as a whole (aristocracy, bourgeoisie, proletariat, peasantry). On his analysis, what distinguished the noblesse de robe as a unified social groups, or class fractions, with its own distinctive ideology, was its collective attempt to become a class, or better still, a ruling class: in other words, to assume executive power within the structure of a nascent absolute monarchy (the so-called ‘second feudalism’).
It is the defeat of this collective ambition by a ‘rising bourgeoisie’ which explains the intense affinity of this group for the Augustinian tradition and its well-nigh ‘Protestant’ revival in Jansenism, whose literary monuments in Pascal’s experience of existential misery and Racine’s evocation of Phèdre’s carnal guilt are Goldmann’s exhibits. His analysis lacks the subtle mediations of Lévi-Strauss’s extraordinary critical practice (although some of the latter’s more brilliant improvisations – the Oedipal link between incest and autochthony, for example – might indeed be taken as an elaborate demonstration of base and superstructure); nonetheless the watchword of a ‘homology’ between these two levels seemed dangerously enough to invite the kind of one-to-one allegorical readings I question in Allegory and Ideology.
I must have shared my discomfort with my old teacher René Girard, for, in a sidewalk cafe in one summer of the early Parisian 60s, he pointed me in the direction of a four-volume work, called Exégèse médiévale, by the eminent theologian Henri de Lubac, hastening to warn me that ‘it isn’t theory!’[2] So we both knew what that meant even in those early days; but it wasn’t philosophy either, I suppose you simply call it scholarship. But it was rich for plunder and appropriation and the first results can be noted in The Political Unconscious (1981),[3] with the rest worked out some forty years later in Allegory and Ideology, and even there scarcely fully elaborated, as the contributors to the present collection testify.
It was, however, the concept of ‘levels’ which seemed preferable and far more practical than the one-to-one homologies of Goldmann; levels, in fact, could already be detected in Lévi-Strauss’s path-breaking reading of the Epic of Asdiwal[4] and seen to be at work everywhere, once one looked for them, from Hjemslev’s semantic analysis of meaning to the ‘stratifications’ of Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux. For such multiple references, transcoding seemed a better word for the interpretive process than hermeneutics, which tends to suggest the existence of some Freudian-style unconscious of the type that figures prominently in any would-be Freudo-Marxism (of the kind denounced above).
The neologism ‘transcoding’, meanwhile, has the advantage of including all the paradoxical language and linguistic issues involved in translation but of subsuming them under a more comprehensive problematic. That it is not merely a matter of some scholarly choice or option, but rather signals historical events in a real world, is demonstrated by one of the more famous moments in the history of modern science, the discovery of DNA, a phenomenon very quickly transcoded into the language of information:
Codes, instructions, signals – all this language, redolent of machinery and engineering, pressed in on biologists like Norman French invading medieval English. In the 1940s the jargon had a precious, artificial feeling, but that soon passed… The scientists complained of ‘what seems to us a rather chaotic growth in technical vocabulary’… ‘As a solution … we would like to suggest the use of the term “interbacterial information” … [which] recognizes the future importance of cybernetics at the bacterial level’.[5]
This crucial moment, then, when the discovery of DNA suddenly invited the cybernetic terminological cluster into the hitherto purely biological discourse of genetics marks a striking example of the levels and their transversal interference: allegory in practice, the sudden x-ray visibility of shifts in the tectonic plates of allegorical stratifications.
We will return later to the solution to the homology problem, the replacement of Goldmann’s model, which my book failed to articulate. I must now, however, fulfill my official obligations here, and comment on the valuable work of the contributors in remarks which are bound to look something like the distribution of prizes or the awarding of degrees one by one. Each one, however, raises a different problematic and merits a whole essay in its own right, an impulse I will try to restrain as much as possible.
I begin with Carolyn Lesjak because she has already written the strongest reply[6] to one of my book’s fundamental targets, namely the the attacks on interpretation gathered under the umbrella of the term ‘post-critique’, and which my own personal ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ tells me are largely anti-political in general and anti-Marxist in particular. In another generation the French philosopher Alain observed: ‘When people ask me if the division between “men of the Right” and “men of the Left” still makes sense, the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a “man of the Left”’.[7] The proponents of a theory-free ‘surface reading’ might have learned from the great philologists of the last century that nothing is more profoundly theoretical than Stilstudien. I fear that Rita Felski’s Limits of Critique,[8] which sometimes strikes me as a desperate attempt to silence a classroom full of noisy and ungovernable children, is itself rather limited when it comes to doing justice to the positive aims of Ideologiekritik: in particular I resent her airy dismissal of my own dimension of ‘restorative’ critique (the anagogical level) as some vague mutterings about ‘collectivity’. Nor do I think Eve Sedgwick’s own work can be reduced to therapy as do those postcritical people who claim her as an ancestor. At any rate, the claim to be non-ideological is always itself ideological; and it is preferable to get on with concrete interpretations than to deplore their undesirability. I am, however, grateful to Lesjak for dispelling the misunderstanding that the book calls for the production of some new allegorical literature, a prospect that makes the blood run cold.
On collectivity, however, Benjamin Noys’s intervention is very welcome indeed. He has understood that it is the collective which preoccupies me here; and not only the collective but population as such, provided it is understood that this familiar and even Malthusian word is a place-holder for some new concept to be created for the purposes of an urgent new situation in the present. I am anxious that all our traditional words for collectivities – ranging from family and clan to race, nation, intersubjectivity, group, city, ethnie, Levinasian otherness, and on to the transcendental empty signifier of Rousseau’s General Will – be grasped as so many conceptual failures and determinate contradictions, as is the Hegelian bad infinite of statistics and numbers itself. There is always a gap, however vast or slight, between that and this; and it is a political as well as a philosophical gap (just as I would argue that all of the narratological arguments in this book have a semi-autonomous existence, as do all these other levels of politics, subjectivity, and perhaps even metaphysics). This preoccupation is not to be vilified as Malthusian, except insofar as that henceforth unspeakable name offers a perspective in which the unity of politics and ecology becomes again visible in a new and profoundly troubling way: one which forces us to grasp the possibility that the immense waves of immigrants from the South are not merely fleeing ‘undemocratic’ regimes and civil wars but also the inevitable infertility caused by climate change. The Europeans, with their anarchistic worries about power in the wake of state communism, think of all this in terms of citizenship; we Americans, for whom it is rather the absence of communism or socialism which is the problem, see our version of the dilemma in terms of racism and xenophobia. But in all these situations unemployment is the proper name for the dilemmas of population as well as for the structural failure of capitalism.
My mixed feelings about Noys’s expanded reading of The Plague are probably as personal as they are theoretical, being myself a Sartrean rather than a Camusean (whose current inflation as a humanistic commodity icon I must deplore). Still, to paraphrase Le Corbusier, a novel is a machine for reading and you can use it in multiple ways: this is not the boring old question of literary value but rather presupposes that value is identified after the fact, as our explanation in hindsight of a moment of astonishment or revelation; and Noys has put the levels to a use which is suggestive.
As for interpretation and its unavoidability, Maria Elisa Cevasco pertinently reminds us that today, as in the past, the problematic category of the national still demands critical attention (and critique, if one may still use that Kantian as well as Marxian word): indeed, it raises the issue of collectivity with a vengeance, whether the privatised subjects of the superstate like it or not. Politics and power today, where only the corporations are really transnational or globalised, must still – left or right – take place within the assigned limits (the paradigm, to use the Kuhnian expression) of the nation-state. Cevasco adduces two great critical practitioners in this context: Raymond Williams, on whom she has written an important study,[9] and the great Brazilian critic and thinker Antonio Candido, our general ignorance of whom simply serves as yet another symptom (if more are needed) of our American imperial provincialism.[10] Williams, so often reduced to the position of a regionalist diagnostician of the defenders of an English ‘tradition’ (which they call British), offers indeed a thoroughgoing programme for cultural revolution; while Candido’s analysis of Brazilian national and more specifically literary peculiarities was at one with the very foundation of Brazilian literary studies itself. What is crucial in both is that the category of nationalism is double-edged and faces in two directions: the denunciation of the ‘national misery’ and the call for the construction of a whole new society (of which ‘nation’ is the not necessarily satisfactory name): le peuple à venir (the people to come), as Deleuze called it, a great collective project rather than an already achieved state with its own proverbial flag, airline, and prison.
Meanwhile, Alberto Toscano lifts another corner of the global veil on another neglected yet major theoretical, literary and political world figure about whom he has himself done much to teach us, namely Franco Fortini,[11] who took the time in a busy and productive life to fashion a major translation of Faust into Italian. This the context in which, in Italy, a debate was renewed which had been initiated by Lukács, whose Faust commentary I must regret having omitted from my chapter here. It turned on the distinction between allegory and symbol, one pursued elsewhere as well (my own reference was Coleridge) and which like so many seemingly literary debates (such as the one touched on above) turns out to be a profoundly political one – allegory standing in for everything artificial about the ancien régime, symbolism for the new unadorned plain speech of the bourgeoisie. For Lukács, then, the heterogeneity of Faust II is clearly an intellectual embarrassment, inasmuch as he had elected Goethe to be the supreme representative of that humanist bourgeoisie worthy of being ‘inherited’ by a humanist socialism. But humanism was for him to be found in the symbol, or ‘concrete universal’, rather than the extravagances of late Goethean pageantry. Lukács opts for the position that Goethe’s allegorical lapses reflect the transitional nature of an eighteenth century unevenly developing into bourgeois secularity: his modern Italian commentators reverse the tiller and see these blemishes as prescient symptoms of the new social order: something Lukács himself seemed unconsciously to have sensed, in his use, on the very first page of his commentary, of the crucial word ‘incommensurable’.
Incommensurability is indeed the key here. Our recent theoretical (dare I say, postmodern?) developments have been characterised by the emergence of a new dogma – that of heterogeneity and of the gap, the break, the cut, the ever so slight internal distance, difference rather than identity and continuism (or homogeneous time_, and one could go on into the more metaphysical dimensions of the Althusserian revolt against Lukácsean humanism, and finally, in the domain that concerns us here, the revulsion against the symbol and the hegemony of metaphor.
The eighteenth century – the age of the bourgeois revolution, of the great transition to industry and capitalism – is the happy hunting ground of those who, like Paul de Man, had an eye for heterogeneity and in particular for the problems it posed for any kind of periodisation (itself numbered among the bad homogeneous concepts a new kind of thinking was out to replace).This is why I feel it appropriate to dwell for a moment on another reaction to my book, Franco Moretti’s immensely useful review,[12] in which he observes that the Goethe chapter is the only one that does not even vaguely gesture towards that background of the mode of production so dear to all orthodox Marxist critics. The absence would seem to confirm the diagnosis I have outlined above, both that the eighteenth century presents a crucial problem for periodisation and also that concepts like “transition” are uniquely doubtful in the first place. As I remain committed to the notion of a mode of production, I will therefore confess that I did have something along these lines in mind; but it seems I suggested it so timidly and discreetly as to render it virtually invisible. This is then my modest proposal: that we invent, for the well-known second feudalism or absolute monarchy, a new periodising concept we might call ‘enlightened absolutism’ in which Enlightenment could itself be seen as a ‘loyal opposition’ within the state (like social democracy today), a whole period in which rational bureaucracy, world philology, monetary and agricultural reforms, enlightened patronage of the arts, the Encyclopédie and the philosophes, the critique of religion and the hopes pinned on dynastic succession – all this constitutes what might be called a ‘long seventeenth century’ from the accession of Louis XIV to the Revolution of 1830. If so, this would not only shed a new (and more suspicious) light on the henceforth monarchical American constitution; it would reorganise the heterogeneity of the eighteenth century itself as a first, secularising stage of capitalism, and change the valences on Goethe’s ‘conservatism’.
But I renounce any further such speculations here, except to deplore their seeming neglect of the contradictions between political and economic levels, and to acknowledge Daniel Hartley’s welcome reestablishment of a different kind of political category – that of the political subject, the citizen, the institutional subjecthood –which my work seems consistently to ignore. Indeed, comrades whom I respect and admire have often deplored what they felt as the absence of politics as such from my work, and its utter disinterest in Machiavelli, Gramsci, Foucault, Balibar, and even the political dimension of Hegel himself. Hartley shrewdly identifies the link between this absence and the interest in impersonality and depersonalisation which is a theme of my literary criticism and which I fear I share with that whole ‘structuralist’ revulsion against that ‘philosophy of the subject’ he is probably too young to have experienced. Existentialism, with its notion of an impersonal consciousness behind the ‘personal’ one or the self (see Sartre’s Transcendence of the Ego[13]), allowed me to square this circle in what was to me a more satisfactory way than the outright anti-subjectivism of the poststructuralists. But he is quite right to suggest that the construction of the subject or the self demands a place in any ontology of the present such as the one my own work claims to offer. In any case, he himself makes a valuable contribution to that programme, which has perhaps been side-lined by the sense people have today, in a world of globalised monopoly, of the powerlessness of individuals and the futility of action.
In fact, I suspect that under these circumstances the displacement of ethics and individual psychology onto psychoanalysis is itself a significant symptom. This is the context in which Clint Burnham’s chapter is to be read, who subjects my reading of Hamlet to a Lacanian perspective, enlivened by his incomparable virtuosity in the use of the Greimasian semiotic square. I am certainly struck by the way in which he (as analyst) diagnoses Freud and Marx in terms of the classic Lacanian dualism of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. Perhaps this opposition might spur us on to a diagnosis of the base/superstructure dichotomy itself, with a little Deleuzian spice: the superstructure then being neurotic, while the base is psychotic and paranoiac (unless it is the other way around). In any case, for better or for worse, Lacan is our Hegel (or perhaps one should say, he is the only Hegel we’ve got), in the sense in which otherness is built into his system and the bourgeois ideological opposition between ‘the individual’ and ‘society’ is thereby consigned to the trashcan. I do not, however, think of this in terms of the much maligned Freudo-Marxisms mentioned above, nor in those of culture-and-personality anthropology either; but will limit myself here to observing that Lacan too, with Seminar XI and the turn towards the drive, inscribes himself in the line of the poststructuralist end-of-the-centred-subject thinkers evoked above.
I have saved for last the most critical of these articles, those of Gabriele Pedullà and Leigh Claire La Berge, which raise the troublesome questions of periodisation as such: the first asking whether a theoretical re-emergence of allegory has any relationship to postmodernity, the second the even larger question of what allegory has to do with periodisation (and narrative) in general. The problem of the dialectic then naturally enough makes its appearance here, as does that of neo-liberalism as the ‘escapable horizon’ of our thought today in late capitalist postmodernity. These are fundamental questions, the ones we know to be basic because we spend our time trying to avoid or forget them (post-critique and post-theory being but one way of doing that).
I will make one observation – on representation – before adding a brief speculative note to these as yet unanswerable questions. I think of the modern period as one in which the problem of representation – that is, the impossibility of representation, either of the social totality or the non-existent ‘self’(in other words, the structural inability of language to do any of that) – was first discovered (along with the existence of the thing called capitalism itself). This is the moment in which Hegel expected philosophy to take the place of art in grappling with the Absolute (the famous or notorious ‘end of art’). As Adorno noted, that did not happen and instead the moment (and the completion of Hegel’s system) turned out to be the end of philosophy. It was then rather art itself, in the form of modernism, which took on the problem of the Absolute, which is to say of representation. But the modernists – from Wordsworth to Dostoyevsky, from George Eliot to Joyce, from Mallarmé to Pound and Eisenstein – thought that they could make the Absolute appear by way of immense formal invention.
Postmodernity faced the same representational dilemmas and impossibilities but registered the universal failures of the modern in the form of their ruins and their translation into so many commodities. What were anxiety-ridden laboratories in the modern period now became amusing clichés and nostalgic allusions, and the Absolute was recognized as a human construction; indeed, everything was slowly being unmasked as constructed: the monumental building, conceived by architects, passing into the hands of the engineers, who were a good deal less pious and ambitious than their modernist forebears.
We are still very much in postmodernity (the third or globalised stage of capitalism) but the older initial postmodernism of the late 70s and early 80s has no doubt been superseded by other styles and in a more general way by the recognition of capitalism as a horizon and of narrative as an inevitable construction. I imagine we now realize that anything can be a narrative but that multiple narrative options do not necessarily amount to relativism. Behind the various historical narratives there is perhaps the deeper reality of the multiple historical breaks on which they are founded; and, indeed, ultimately the contradictions which are their situation and their ground.
The four levels constitute a kind of closure or outer limit to such narratives and such interpretations, as relativistic as they may first seem. (I probably need to add, in passing, that for me the closed/open distinction is classic Cold War ideology and should be abandoned along with some of the other knee-jerk ideological oppositions of the period.)
But when I finished this book, I did not really have the answer to the question – why four? And why are your levels any different from Goldmann’s homologies, except that there are more of them? I do now and want briefly to sketch out this solution in conclusion. Each level has to be understood as an opposition rather than a theme. Contradictions are binary oppositions, and thus the opposition I just mentioned, closed versus open, would make for a good example and one which is not resolved by ‘synthesis”’ But each level is an expression of this contradiction in its own domain: thus here are closed and open societies (political level), there is Fordist versus flexible production on some economic level, just as there is the centred subject and the multiple subject-positions, or Eco’s closed versus open work of art. Each of these expresses the ‘contradiction’ in its own local reality and its own local idiom or idiolect, so that their array looks like a variety of different themes.
But now we need to pay closer attention to our own terminology and limit the word ‘contradiction’ to each individual level. Now it is the kinship between these various contradictions that we want to theorise in some less mechanical way than by the parallelism of the homology. (Certainly, there can be contradictions between the various levels themselves, but that is material for a more advanced course!)
So now I will introduce a new terminology, that of the category. Categories are well-known entities, Aristotle lists nine or ten of them in the Metaphysics, and elsewhere: who, what, why, when, etc. Kant, then, in a stunningly pre-semiotic or pre-Greimasian conceit, bundles them together in four complementary packages and sets them up in a revolving circle. Hegel, however, immensely expands them into the quasi-evolutionary procession of dynamic and self-transcending forms that make up the Greater Logic.
What we need to remember in all this, however, is that in Greek ‘category’ means dilemma or stumbling block. It is the antinomy rather than the contradiction, what sticks in the craw of conceptual thought, what resists thought let alone expression. These categories spell the inevitable epistemological failure of the human enterprise, collective as well as individual: but those failures are historical, and we have the example of Hegel to demonstrate how a contradiction (or a failure) can historically be overcome by enlarging it into an even more comprehensive contradiction or failure (this is what you call a productive, an energising pessimism!).
The point is that a given historical moment is always characterised by a fundamental limit in the form of what we have been calling a category. The levels, the force-fields of the various contradictions, are all then so many distinct forms projected by that underlying category or antinomy. Within each of these levels, we dispose of an instrument of analysis, the Greimas square, which is built on the tension between Relationship and Synonymity: that is, it distinguishes between various forms of difference at the same time that its individual terms, by their variations, modulate through multiple language-fields (thereby anticipating the multiplicity of the levels themselves).
But the problem remains that of the ultimate relationship of the different levels to that underlying dilemma or impossibility which is the category itself. Difference relates, to be sure; but the difference between the individual levels is an utterly different kind of difference than that between the levels and their fundamental category (however historical the latter may be).
This is a problem that cannot be solved, as we have suggested, by parallelisms and homologies; nor can it be dismissed by way of a properly postmodern tendency to welcome a sheer multiplicity of unrelated differences. Are we then back in the old Kantian dilemma, where it is the category which becomes the thing-in-itself or unknowable noumenon, and the levels phenomena which are alone accessible, conceptualisable, and representable for us? An idealist solution would grasp the levels as so many manifestations or ‘emanations’ of the fundamental antinomy; the existential requirement then also obliges us to acknowledge the incommensurability of the levels as such. The most difficult task, however, is the one confronted by any genuine materialism seeking to grasp the way the category demonstrates ‘how matter has its way with human beings’ (Benjamin) and seeking to do so historically: unfinished business!
References
Alain (1956) Propos, Paris: Gallimard.
Candido, Antonio (1995) On Literature and Society, ed. and trans. Howard S. Becker, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cevasco, Maria Elisa (2001) Para ler Raymond Williams, São Paulo: Paz e Terra.
de Lubac, Henri (1998) Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 1: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark. Sebanc, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
– (2000), Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 2: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. E.M. Macierowski, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
– (2009), Medieval Exegesis, Vol. 3: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. E.M. Macierowski, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.
Felski, Rita (2015) The Limits of Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fortini, Franco (2016) A Test of Powers: Writings on Criticism and Literary Institutions, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano, Calcutta: Seagull.
Gleick, James (2011) The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, New York, Pantheon Books.
Goldmann, Lucien (2016) The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody, pref. Michael Löwy, London: Verso.
Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Lesjak, Carolyn (2013) ‘Reading Dialectically’, Criticism, 55, 2: 233-277.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1976 [1958]) ‘The Story of Asdiwal’, in Structural Anthropology Two,
trans. Monique Layton, 146–97, New York: Basic Books.
Moretti, Franco (2020) ‘Always Allegorize?’, New Left Review 121: 53-64.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1960 [1936]) The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, New York: Hill & Wang.
[1] Goldmann 2016.
[2] De Lubac 1998, 2000 and 2009.
[3] Jameson 1981.
[4] Lévi-Strauss 1976.
[5] Gleick 2011, pp. 289-90.
[6] Lesjak 2013.
[7] Alain 1956, p. 983.
[8] Felski 2015.
[9] Cevasco 2001.
[10] Candido 1995.
[11] Fortini 2016.
[12] Moretti 2020.
[13] Sartre 1960.
