(edited by Catherine from email conversations early November 2007)

"Original description from Scholar: Matt Wilkens from Duke U."
"The three-sentence version of my idea: I think that a rise in the prominence of allegory should be an expected correlate of revolutionary change in a given community or situation, since the kinds of epistemological breaks involved in such events demand the expression of new ideas using existing vocabularies and structures, i.e., telling one directly legible story while suggesting another. In my current book project, I have a well-elaborated theoretical argument (using Badiou and Benjamin, mostly) about why this should be so, as well as a series of close readings (concerning late modernism) to support it, but what I really need is a vastly broader historical survey of "allegoricalness" across the last few centuries. If I'm right, I'd expect to see short spikes of "allegoricalness"
corresponding to periodizing events superimposed on whatever more gradual trends might exist in the quantity or rate of allegorical production over historical time.

The corpus has been the sticking point for me thus far. It needs to be large, both to offer the kind of historical breadth I'm thinking about and to generate statistics that are sufficiently refined so as to allow us find these narrow spikes. It won't do, of course, to bin the texts in 50-year chunks - it needs to be more like 5 years or less, and the numbers have to be big enough that we can distinguish signal from noise."

 
For more details see the email discussion between Matt and Martin on Nov 11, 2007

----Original Message----
From: monk-bounces@lists.lis.uiuc.edu [mailto:monk-bounces@lists.lis.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Martin Mueller
Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2007 8:31 AM
To: Matthew Wilkens
Cc: Monk Development
Subject: Re: [Monk] Welcome to Matt Wilkens