Publication subTitle :Modernist Allegories of Conversion
Author: Beryl Schlossman
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication year: 1990
E-ISBN: 9780822382997
P-ISBN(Paperback): 9780822310945
P-ISBN(Hardback): 9780822310761
Subject: I06 Literature, Literature Appreciation
Language: ENG
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Description
Toward the end of Remembrance of Things Past, the narrator describes the act of creating a work of art as a conversion of sensation into a spiritual equivalent. By means of such allegories of “conversion,” Schlossman shows, the modernist artist disappeared within the work of art and left behind the trace of his sublime vocation, a vocation in which he was transformed, in Schlossman’s words, “into a kind of priest kneeling at the altar of beauty before the masked divinity of representation.”
The author shows how allegory—the representation of the symbolic as something real—was adapted by modernist writers to reflect subjectivity while masking an authorial origin. She reveals how modernist allegory arose, as Walter Benjamin suggests, at the crossroads of history, sociology, economics, urban architecture, and art—providing a kind of map of capitalism—and was