“That’s also an Allegory:” Literary Criticism’s Struggles with Modern Allegorism

Abstract

The author analyses the concept of allegory, a classical poetic figure, as a kind of a “travelling concept,” a notion that informs contemporary literary criticism. He argues that the growing interest in allegorical styles of reading in the modern humanities stems from two important sources: the works of Walter Benjamin, who reclaimed the Baroque allegory for contemporary poetics, and Paul de Man, who redefined it as an inherent quality of literature and the universal mode of textual interpretation. The author then examines different ways of employing this modern understanding of allegory (as a topic, style or stylization, and as a way of reading) by three contemporary writers and critics Grzegorz Jankowicz, Alina Świeściak and Rafał Wawrzyńczyk.