Langland and Allegory: A Proposition
Proposes that L’s allegory might be productively understood within a Realist philosophical tradition, as opposed to a tradition in which allegory continuously abstracts the letter, that “the real is signified by and subsumed into the abstract-most often as in personification.” The latter tradition of abstraction seems to be realized more in Coleridge than in medieval authorities such as DeGuileville’s PĂ©lerinage de la Vie Humaine, whose allegorical practice L seems to mimic. “The important point . . . is that in cognitive theory the individual ” what we moderns might call the concrete or real ” is not in opposition to substance “or what we might call the abstract or conceptual. Rather, the real or substantial exists invisibly but makes itself known to us through its accidents.”