Symbolism,

Imagery &
Allegory
In Feed by M.T Anderson

What are these

things?

Symbolism -

symbolism exists whenever something is

meant to represent something else. Symbolism is a figure of
speech than is used when an author wants to create a certain
mood or emotion in a work of literature. Symbolism is the use of
an object, person, situation, or word to represent something
else (an idea) in literature.

Imagery

- In a literary text, is an author's use of vivid and

descriptive language to add depth to his or her work. It appeals
to human senses to deepen the reader's understanding of the
work. Powerful forms of imagery engage all of the senses and
use metaphors to express ideas and concepts.

Allegory - is a piece of art or literature, like a

poem or story, in which people, things or
happenings have a hidden or symbolic meaning
(underneath the plot).

Difference between Allegory and

Symbolism
Although an allegory uses symbols, it is
different fromsymbolism. An allegory is a
completenarrative, which involves
characters, and events that stand for an
abstract idea or an event. Asymbol, on the
other hand, is an object that stands for
another object giving it a particular meaning.
Unlike allegory, symbolism does not tell a
story. For example, Plato in his Allegory of
Cave tells a story of how some people are
ignorant and at the same time, some people
see the light stands for an idea and does
not tell a story.

The Boat painting Symbol

This is just a simple painting on the wall of the moon's hospital,

but Titus can't keep his eyes off it. Check out how he describes
it, twice:
One [of the walls] had a picture of a boat on it. The boat was
on a pond or maybe lake. I couldn't find anything interesting
about that picture at all. There was nothing that was about
to happen or had just happened. (8.2)
I couldn't do a fuckin' thing except look at that stupid boat
painting, which was even worse, because now I saw that
there was no one on the boat, which was even more stupid,
and was kind of how I felt, that the sails were up, and the
rudder was, well, whatever rudders are, but there was no
one on board to look at the horizon. (10.7)

The boat painting

- Continued
Something about this painting really gets under Titus's skin.
Part of the problem is that Titus (as well as his friends)
suffers from a distinct lack of curiosity. He's so used to
insta-gratification and over-stimulation that this painting
seems like a personal insult.It also brings out Titus's selfcenteredness. Part of what he hates is that there's no one
there to "look at the horizon." He just can't appreciate this
simple scene of nature. This could be because it's
completely alien to him; he's never seen a body of water
that doesn't look like a pile of steaming toxic goo. The
painting symbolizes the pristine nature that Titus's world
has lostand Titus would rather just not think about that.

(http://wwwshmoop.com)

According to Shmoop
Symbolism- The Meat Farm
We're talking meat growing in fields like
ears of corn, not actually animals, but
growing pieces of meat:
We could see all these miles and miles of
filet mignon from where we were sitting,
and some places where the genetic coding
had gone wrong and there, in the middle
of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn
or an eye or a heart blinking up at the
sunset. (29.17)
On the surface, a meat farm sure sounds
like a good idea. No dead cows, yay! But
then there's that dark side: the horns and
eyes and blinking heart lurking within the
good meat.Enjoy that eye in the middle of
your filet!

Lesions &
symbolism

One major sign that all isn't right in the world of the feed:
everyone's getting horrible weeping sores. The book doesn't tell
us why this is happening, but the feed chatter does clue us in a
little. For example, we find out that there's so much background
radiation that people have to have their children via genetic
engineering; they can't have them naturally. We also see
industrial accidents causing black toxic sludge that drowns whole
villages. Based on this information, we can guess that the lesions
symbolize the corruption of the environmentand that they're a
sign the human race may not be long for this world.
Weird thing is, these lesions actually become hot fashion
accessories by the end of the book, with Quendy getting so many
that you can see her insides and muscles and tendons and stuff.
(Not a good look.) More importantly, we get the idea that people
just don't care anymore.
They're going
to ride the wave of
Just makeup
artistry!!
destruction until the very end.

According to Shmoop
Imagery - Enjoy Your
Banquet
The kids have all kinds of wacky slang, but "banquet" is a relatively
normal word that keeps popping up in unusual situations:
"If there weren't those people, then maybe we wouldn't all be
standing here having a big shame banquet." (4.3)
"Like, thanks for the heapin' helpings of yawn banquet." (25.7)
"You're laying this whole guilt banquet." (53.59)
A banquet is an occasion for massive consumption of food, usually
in a swanky environment, and Titus and his friends have been
conditioned to always be in consumption mode. So, it's perfectly
natural that his generation will use a lot of imagery relating to
high-class consumption.

Allegory in Feed
Function of Allegory
Writers use allegory to add different layers of
meanings to their works. Allegory makes their
stories and characters multidimensional, so that
they stand for something larger in meaning
than what they literally stand for. Allegory
allows writers to put forward their moral and
political point of views. A careful study of an
allegorical piece of writing can give us an
insight into its writers mind as how he views
the world and how he wishes the world to be.
http://literarydevices.net/allegory/

Allegory Weve seen this

before!
After Titus wakes up in the hospital, he checks his feed
memory from just before it shut down, and sees this
message: "You have been hacked by the Coalition of
Pity" (11.1). So, just who is the Coalition of Pity? Well,
we don't get to see much of them, other than the weird
old guy who hacks the kids' feeds at The Rumble Spot,
and the weird dream images that Titus and Violet see:
I saw khakis that were really cheap, only $150, but I
didn't like the stitching, and then I saw them torn and
there was blood on them. It was a riot on a street, and
people were screaming in some other language [...]
They were in front of factories, and clouds of gas
drifted through them and the American flags they were
burning started to spark big, and the gas got darker
and darker [...] I saw long cables going through the
sea. I saw girls sewing things, little girls in big halls. I
saw people praying over missiles. (30.3-4)

The Coalition of Pity

We don't get the fullCont
story on the Coalition, but we can piece
together that it's an underground resistance organization
that attempts to wake people up to the harsh realities of the
world: abuses of workers, political tensions, and the general
going-to-pot nature of everything. So, they're kind of like a
cross between Occupy Wall Streetand Anonymous, but we
get the impression that the Coalition of Pity is actually
getting stuff done and causing a stir wherever they go.

(Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is the name given to a

protest movement that began on September 17,
2011, in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall
Street financial district, receiving global attention
and spawning the Occupy movement against social
and economic inequality worldwide)

Allegory cont
http://
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/200
4/01/0111_040112_consumerism.html
https://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-corporate_ac
tivism

Homework:
What is corporate activism?