Summary
Author of the ‘Third-World Literature’ essay (1986) whose concept of National allegory Anna Bernard defends and reclaims in Chapter 1 of Rhetorics of Belonging (PDF p.25, p.31).
Details
- Jameson’s definition, as quoted by Bernard: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (1986, 69, quoted PDF p.31).
- Bernard reads the essay as a theory of metropolitan reading: an intentionally ‘sweeping’ corrective to the first-world reader taught to affirm a ‘radical split’ between poetics and politics (1986, 69), urging readers to “confront honestly the fact of fragmentation on a global scale” (1986, 67, quoted PDF p.31).
- In The Geopolitical Aesthetic (1992), Jameson distinguishes the first-world’s fragmentary allegorical thinking from the ‘older’, “conscious and overt” (1986, 80) national allegories of the earlier essay (PDF p.32).
- Bernard also cites The Political Unconscious: a reader ‘bored or scandalized’ by a text’s roots in its historical moment resists his own political unconscious (2002, 19) (PDF p.37).