ALLEGORICAL STRUCTURE IN LITERARY DISCOURSE: WESTERN AND CHINESE

I have developed a theory of allegory that can account for our allegorical response to a text, describe the textual behavior of formal allegories, and evaluate the aesthetic function of allegorical operation in diverse contexts. By investigating formal allegories and critical works on allegory in Western and Chinese traditions, I conclude that allegory should be studied at the two-fold level of structural principles and textual manifestations of these principles, both exhibiting sufficient patterns for formulation despite the fact that textual manifestation takes protean form, conditioned by cultural and literary conventions.;Chapter I, on "allegoresis," first investigates allegorical reading as a common strategy to "neutralize" problematic texts, the problematic varying intratextually and extratextually. It notices that underpinning allegorical mentality are assumptions that a text ultimately refers to reality, and that the meaning exists in a dichotomy of obvious meaning and hidden meaning, with the latter being assigned greater significance. It then illustrates how, historically, such assumptions have regulated allegorical response to Homer, the Bible, and The Book of Poetry, noting that the Western practice tends to see hidden meaning as referring to a more abstract structure of reality as opposed to the Chinese practice of seeing it as referring to a historical fact or some moral admonition. It goes on to demonstrate how, despite the arbitrariness of much allegoresis, conventions of reading and writing did develop from the arbitrary practice.;Chapter II is on "formal allegory." It provides critical overview of the traditional concepts of "allegory," as manifested in explicit formulations and texts pointed to as allegories. It then reformulates traditional insights in terms of a modified version of Max Black's interactive theory of metaphor. The two senses in allegory are then seen as two systems, or two texts reconstituted from a unitary text, with allegorical markers initiating the reconstitution in diverse forms. "The primary subject" (approximately, "hidden meaning") tends to be the less specific and the loftier of the two senses and thus confers a note of generality on "the secondary subject" (the "surface sense"), while itself receiving reification and enrichment of meaning. "The Wolf of Chung-shan" and Psychomachia are the principal texts used to illustrate this formulation. Moreover I take note of the excess elements that do not directly participate in allegorical operation yet often generate surprising effects in allegorical surroundings. Finally, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" is used to illustrate how a text can have two interactive senses, but with the primary subject remaining ambivalent or hidden: this leads to a restatement of the relationship between allegory and symbol.;Chapter III analyzes The Dream of the Red Chamber. While reaffirming the novel's achievement as a realistic work, I also demonstrate how the supernatural world, centrally presented in the prologue, forms a separate literary universe constructed of mythological and Buddhist-Taoist materials as much as deliberate absurdity and fictionality. The prologue in effect exercises the control of a primary subject over the realistic main story, superimposing the interpretation that the plenitude and multitudinousness of the human world are as illusory as an enactment of a scenario composed in the Land of Illusion. Absurdity and fictionality, though constituents of the primary subject, function also to call attention to the fact that both the human world and the supernatural world (and hence the allegorical meaning) are the product of the whims of human imagination. The novel is a complex play on our allegorical expectations: by undercutting its own allegorical claim to the theme of illusion and reality, it drives home the very problem of illusion and reality.