This talk will explore the creative reading practices developed by Fredric Jameson (1934-2024) in Allegory and Ideology (2019), the final completed volume of his more-than-four-decades-in-the making, six-volume intervention, the Poetics of Social Forms. At the conclusion of his book’s fifth chapter, Jameson notes, “The situation is here, as always, everything; and our slogan should be, not only that everything is allegorical, but even more, that all allegory is Utopian!” Jameson moves here through the four allegorical levels and traces the overarching trajectory of the Poetics as a whole, as he passes from situations (the literal) through allegory (allegorical and ethical) and into the ultimate horizon of Utopia (anagogical). The talk will touch on Jameson’s relationship to the practices of allegoresis developed in the fourth century by the Christian mystic Gregory of Nyssa and the final developments in Jameson’s long-term experiments with A. J. Greimas’s semiotic square.
Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Florida, as well as the director of the Working Group for the Study of Critical Theory. He is the author of numerous essays and six books, including most recently Invoking Hope: Theory and Utopia in Dark Times (Minnesota, 2020) and the forthcoming Late Theory; Jameson, or, The Persistence of Reading (Minnesota 2026).