SOURCE: Hendershot, Cyndy. “Postmodern Allegory and David Lynch's Wild at Heart.” Critical Arts 9, no. 1 (1995): 5-20.

In the following essay, Hendershot defines postmodern allegory within the context of Wild at Heart.

In Postmodernist Fiction Brian McHale discusses the resurgence of the allegorical mode in the postmodern era, a resurgence in both critical analysis of the mode and artistic practice of it¹. Maureen Quilligan sees the postmodern and allegorical linked so closely as to assert that “we seem in the last quarter of the twentieth century to have reentered an allegorical age”². Many critics see postmodern allegory as revealing our historical situation and subjectivities to us. Bainard Cowan asserts that allegory “discloses the truth of the world” by presenting our world and our subjectivities as systems of signs rather than as systems motivated by a transcendental signified³. A dark cloud, as it were, hovers over postmodernism's appropriation of the allegorical...