| Most late twentieth and twenty-first century theorists of allegory describe contemporary allegory as a figure of indeterminacy, a feature of language wherein the grammatical meaning of a text differs from its rhetorical meaning. This understanding of allegory derives largely from Paul de Man, whose Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust has heavily influenced the way contemporary readers interpret allegory. This dominant critical framework for allegory tends to eclipse any understanding of allegory as a genre and expressive mode marked by specific formal features. As a result, dominant understandings of allegory often suppress the religious and didactic dimensions of many contemporary allegories which---though formally different from their medieval and renaissance precursors---nevertheless frequently retain the religious and polemical cultural functions of earlier manifestations of allegory. Textual analyses of postmodern allegories ranging from virtual reality thrillers to feminist experimental novels to avant-garde film and the postcolonial novel demonstrate, however, that religious impulses continue to animate twentieth-century allegory. Such analysis, by modeling reading protocols that provide an alternative to locating textual indeterminacies and contradictions, also highlights truth and value claims of postmodern fictions, which are too often routinely read as exercises in indeterminacy that fail to make claims about what is real and what is true. In exploring the religiosity of a number of postmodern allegories, this study helps counter mischaracterizations, repeated in both the academic and popular press, of postmodernism as "shallow" and "hollow," lacking relevance and commitment to matters of urgent human concern. |
