William Blake and ‘Allegory address'd to the Intellectual powers’

William Blake and ‘Allegory address'd to the Intellectual powers’: Swedenborgian Correspondence, Romantic Symbolism, and the Metamorphoses of Allegory

Peter Otto (University of Melbourne)

• Wednesday 15 April, 4.00-5:30pm
• 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne

Abstract

William Blake (1757–1827) is routinely presented as preoccupied by the unities of symbolism and dismissive of the divided levels of allegory. In contrast, this paper argues that in Blake’s oeuvre, where no secure transcendental anchor for allegory’s ‘other speaking’ and symbolism’s organic form is offered, allegory becomes a vehicle for representing and contesting the genesis of phenomena (and therefore experience) in the exchanges between particulars (experience) and supposed universals (convention). In Blake’s hands allegory can therefore take a variety of forms and inspire a variety of reading practices, which range from those antithetical to vision to those that enable it. In the most iconoclastic of these forms, allegory becomes a device able to hold incommensurate voices, energies, and narratives in contingent, non-hierarchical relation with each other, in a whole that is processual, includes the reader as active agent, and is therefore not finally totalisable.

Peter Otto

Peter Otto is Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor at the University of Melbourne, Executive Director of the Research Unit in Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture', and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (since 2004). His publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP, 2011); Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes (Romantic Circles, 2013); and 21st Century Oxford Authors: William Blake (OUP, Dec. 25, 2018). He is currently completing a book on William Blake, secularisation, and the history of imagination.