The shift from Symbol to allegory marks the modernism-to-postmodernism break

Evidence

For the displacement of modernism by Postmodernism can also be measured and detected in the crisis of the older aesthetic absolute of the Symbol, as its formal and linguistic values secured their hegemony in the long period from romanticism to New Criticism and the canonization of “modernist” works in the university system in the late 1950s. … If the symbolic is (overhastily) assimilated to various organic conceptions of the work of art and of culture itself, then the return of the repressed of its various opposites, and of a whole range of overt or covert theories of the allegorical, can be characterized by a generalized sensitivity, in our own time, to breaks and discontinuities, to the heterogeneous (not merely in works of art), to Difference rather than Identity, to gaps and holes rather than seamless webs and triumphant narrative progressions, to social differentiation rather than to Society as such and its “totality,” in which older doctrines of the monumental work and the “concrete universal” bathed and reflected themselves. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 391

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the allegorical as the aesthetic opponent of the Symbol, keyed to breaks, heterogeneity, and Difference.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s goal of distinguishing parody/pastiche — both are postmodern allegorical modes keyed to discontinuity rather than organic Symbol unity. — connects to: Postmodernism fuses changes in the arts with poststructuralist philosophy — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 27; Symbolism arises only after objects have lost immediate meaning — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 349