Reading Allegory in a Secular Age: Mid-Century Theology and the Allegoresis of Frye and Jameson

Abstract

This essay treats the division between hermeneutic models that emphasize surface and depth by examining two of the most influential twentieth century theoreticians of allegory: Northrop Frye and Fredric Jameson. It argues that the sense of depth in Frye and Jameson can be fully appreciated only if we recover the impact of a discipline not usually considered to be a major influence on their projects, namely, that of the mid-twentieth century Protestant theology of Karl Barth and Rudolph Bultmann. This influence is centered on three different categories: the shape of temporality, the significance of myth, and the construction of literary theory as a science.

Keywords:

• allegory
• allegoresis
• secularization
• Frye
• Jameson
• Barth
• Bultmann

Notes

1 As an example, one might consider the way in which most surveys of early British literature are allied to a notion of the rise of a triumphalist Protestantism (Simpson 1–4).

2 See the introduction to this issue, by Best and Marcus.

3 For a representative sense of contemporary reactions to Bultmann’s Demythologization, see Macquarrie, Scope.

4 As Barth puts the point more polemically, “The time has come to launch a protest in the name of purity and propriety against the corruption of theology which has now been in full swing so long and which has been brought about by trying to understand and treat it simply as a branch of the humanities in general” (Dogmatics 285).

5 On this point, see also Timothy Gorringe’s commentary — “Barth maintained that God is ‘unveiled’ only as God is veiled” (59).