| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 97 === Two of the paradigms in William Blake scholarship – analyzing the inner structure of Blake’s symbolism and contextualizing Blake in his time, can be integrated in an ideological criticism. The poetic form in Blake is profoundly associated with the eighteenth-century radicalisms their conservative counter-forces. Blake’s discursive interaction with his time is as much reflected in the content, the direct statements of his thought, as in his form, which is the major carrier of his critique of contemporary ideology.
The form on which this thesis concentrates is allegory, which reflects the contemporary ideology most profoundly. From seventeenth to eighteen century there emerge anxieties about and suspicions of allegorical expressions and its effectuality and authenticity to facilitate and secure genuine communication and the acquisition of knowledge. Allegory, as a form of expression encompassing multiple levels of meaning and confounding disparate materials, has become a threat to clear knowledge and unalienated communication.
Blake wrote at a time of the crisis in allegory, which lost its supremacy at the rise of rationalism and neoclassicism from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century. The first chapter surveys several important cultural and intellectual paradigms such as puritan aesthetics, neoclassicism and some linguistic organicisms to demonstrate the increasing anxiety about the allegorical form and the nascent preference for a certain form of allegory. It then concentrates on some key thinkers such as John Locke, Edmund Burke, S. T. Coleridge and Tom Paine to see how the anxiety about allegory is constitutive of their thinking and what they provide as the solution. It argues specifically that these individual thinkers virtually contribute to a hegemony of the metonymic dimension of allegory by downplaying its metaphoric complexity.
In counteracting the hegemony, Blake develops the idea of the minute particular with two later works, Jerusalem and Laocoön, which are discussed in chapter two and three respectively. By the allegorical as well as counter-allegorical techniques of parataxis, repetition, and dramatization in Jerusalem, Blake presents a rich array of minute particulars that question and react to the ideologies and politics and counters the hegemony from neoclassicism to the prestige of metonymic allegory. This rhetorical politics is advanced in Laocoön, in which the very nature of allegory is taken into question. The third chapter on Laocoön demonstrates how Blake makes his allegorical style a self-undoing irony, and realizes a main source of the contemporary politics of allegory, money and the commodity culture. All these formal manipulations or experimentations are Blake’s poetic commitment to searching for the minute particulars – the troubling, haunting residues that threaten allegorical purity and force an ongoing dialectics and dynamics.
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