Allegory and Rhetoric

Abstract

In the West, allegory has been defined through both rhetoric, which produces pleasing and persuasive speech, and hermeneutics, the interpreting of esoteric meanings. Over the long span of its history, allegory has internalized the tension between the open and the esoteric. Allegory as we now understand it is an impossible conceptual nexus of opacity and clarity, interiority and exteriority, content and form. It is pushed and pulled between the domains of philosophical interpretation and literary production. This chapter surveys the long history of that tension between the poles of rhetoric and hermeneutics, from the rise and fall of allegory up to the nineteenth century, to the reclaiming of allegory along with the ascendency of rhetoric in twentieth-century thought.