Description

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Considers allegory as a catalyst of transformative thinking

Allegorical Moments is a set of essays dedicated to rethinking allegory and arguing for its significance as a creative and critical response to sociopolitical, environmental, and existential turmoil affecting the contemporary world. Traditionally, allegorical interpretation was intended to express an orthodoxy and support an ideology. Hejinian attempts to liberate allegory from its dogmatic usages. Presenting modern and contemporary materials ranging from the novel to poetry to painting and cinema to activist poetry of the Occupy movement, each essay in the book "begins again" with different materials and from different perspectives. Hejinian's generative scholarship looks back to experimental modernism and forward into a future for a vital, wayward poetry resistant to the crushing global effects of neoliberalism.

About the Author

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LYN HEJINIAN (Berkeley, CA) is a feminist avant-garde poet and scholar. She is the author of numerous books including the bestselling My Life and My Life in the Nineties. A native Californian, for many years she was a professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley and continues her scholarly and creative work nearby.