Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between allegorical modes of representation and dialectical forms of argumentation as the principle key to the analysis of the conceptual problems posed by language as an aesthetic medium. The thesis reflects on the allegorical indirection language imposes on the attempts to analyze it, and the dialectical inescapability of the complications it engenders. ;The first chapter considers the difficulty and the necessity of including literature in the more general philosophical discourse of the aesthetic, in light of the distinction between the linguistic medium of literature and the phenomenality of the concept of the aesthetic. Literature is the reflexive moment where the discourse of the aesthetic confronts its own linguistic medium of conceptual understanding in the work of art it reflects upon, a dialectical reversal that makes the problems posed by literature coextensive with philosophical conceptualization proper. ;Chapter two argues that the Classical definition of allegory as a metaphor interrupts the process of conceptual differentiation, and thus suspends the historical development of the concept of allegory, leaving later periods inevitably to repeat the complications involved in the Classical formulation. The inability of allegory to develop conceptually puts into question the validity of the trope as a model for language. ;The third chapter analyzes the relation of allegory to the general theory of tropological discourse in its fundamental exposition, the Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian. Defined as a trope, allegory reverts in the course of the discourse to a figure, thus revealing a literalizing moment constitutive of the concept of the trope itself. The modulation of allegory in Quintilian reintroduces grammatical distinctions into the tropological model of language, and therefore permits the articulation of the theory of tropes with the propositional structure of conceptual logic. ;The fourth chapter studies the representational reversals of the drama that make it the privileged genre in formal and aesthetic considerations of literature. In a reading of Shelley's The Cenci, the aesthetic uncertainties surrounding the play serve to reveal the distinction between the inferential and predicative forms of representation in the linguistic structure of judgment. Allegory appears as the self-critical moment in the text that distinguishes the subject as a grammatical structure from the predicates of understanding, and thus separates representation in language from the phenomenal assumptions of the aesthetic model