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Reading Paradise Lost through New Historicism and Other Approaches---

I. John Milton (1608-1674) is a poet of Christian utopian vision from England who began to write Paradise Lost in 1657 and completed it in 1665. On taking his M.A. in Christ college of Cambridge he retired to his father’s house at Hammersmith and Horton, and spent the next six years (1632-38) in an earnest effort, untrammeled by scholastic ‘sow-thistles and brambles,’ to master all fruitful knowledge and thought.(Bush,1949,1977. p.2) Since it was published in 1667, the epic P.L. and the poet have been evaluated in so much positive and negative ways which are summed up in both Milton 1732-1801: The Critical Heritage by John T. Shawcross (Shawcross, 1972) and Milton: Poetical Works by Douglas Bush (Bush, 1979. P.xiv). Their responses toward John Milton are epitomized as follows: Milton is poet-priest, poet-scholar, epic poet-religious poet, classical humanist, Christian humanist, noble and philosophically enhanced democratic poet, poet of historical consciousness making efforts to achieve historian mission, poet who is critical of conventional trends of literature and culture, religious, social, and politic. And Milton was criticized for breaking traditional customs and practices in terms of verse, language and literary mode. The poet was also criticized as stubborn for his ideas and thoughts deviated from contemporary ones. As time has passed, however, his negative responses turn to more positive ones for today’s standards. This paper aims to pursue John Milton’s utopian aspects in vision including Christian utopian vision in P.L. through New Historicism, and along with pursuit of the main aim the writer would like to further understand P.L. in which irony and ambiguity of Satan can be analyzed on the base of New Criticism. Then, I want to describe a reader’s some response in P.L. as text. In 1982 a term, New Historicism was coined by Stephen Greenblatt to initiate a new mode of literary criticism (Greenblatt, Introduction to Genre, Vol. 15. 1982), and hence, new historicists have approached to interpret literary works as per their various perspectives of New Historicism. In a result, the boundaries between literature and history are indistinct and unwarranted, so that the boundaries between them have set out to be demolished, and culture including literature cannot be confined in history, but literature and history can raise resonance between them only to make wonderful value judgments each other (Greenblatt’s “Resonance and Wonder.” Ed. Peter, 1990). The past is never an objectified thing which could be neutrally represented or transparently regenerated by way of our narrow modern readers’ concern. Though, in Paradise Lost as literary epic, the writer can find utopian aspects in vision related to the historical background of the seventeenth century England when the poet John Milton was living. In this sense, the New Historicism approach has its own advantage in literary criticism of literary work Paradise Lost. This paper is not challenging a huge proposition like a role literature takes in history. Instead, it is to provide with new reading and critical approaches through closely harmonized prism between past, present, and future because the present is the nearest past toward the future. Further discussion will be continued on the following part in this paper. T. S. Eliot mentioned negatively on John Milton’s epic due to the dissociation of sensibility in “The Metaphysical Poets”, which had influence on New Criticism. (Ed. M. H. Abrams, 1993. 246). The term New Criticism was made current by the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism in 1941. It came to be applied as a theory and practice that dominated American literary criticism until late in the 1960s. The movement derived in considerable part from elements in I. A. Richards’ Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), and from the critical essays of T. S. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Ed. Abrams.1993 (1919,1920). 2170-2176) and “The Metaphysical Poets”(Ed. Abrams. 1993. (1921). 2176-2183). In terms of T.S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’ as his creative theory, John Milton’s P.L. was not highly evaluated due to dissociation of sensibility, which means lacking unification of sensibility. “It is interesting to speculate whether it is not a misfortune that two of the greatest masters of diction in our language, John Milton and John Dryden, triumph with a dazzling disregard of the soul. Those who object to the ‘artificiality’ of Milton or Dryden sometimes tell us to look into our hearts and write. But that is not looking deep enough, but Racine or Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts” (Ed. Abrams.1993. 2182) which can make the poem be unified of sensibility. Further the followings will be continually discussed in this paper. A reader’s response was made by Stanley Eugene Fish in Surprised by Sin (Fish, 1971) based on Reader Response Criticism. When I as a reader start to read the scene where Satan betrayed God in Heaven and fell to the Hell as bottomless pit, my initial response toward Satan and the environment of Hell has continually occurred. The reader’s response will be further developed by reading process and interacting between reader and text related to Satan. My own response as a reader reading P.L. shall be described. Discussion will be further continued on the following part in this paper.

II-1 In terms of literature review and significance of this paper, the writer thinks that people, whoever they may be, whenever they may live, wherever they may live, in common with any individual, group, society and nation, should have their right and responsibility for improving, innovating, renovating, reforming, reconstructing and remodeling their present living condition and situation up to the maximal and best quality. In the same context, the poet John Milton in his contemporary era could also be analogized to have his own utopian vision to improve, renovate, reform, and reconstruct his society and culture of England in which there were included such elements as class, race, gender, religion, ethnic identity as well. Such an aspiration which John Milton in the seventeenth century clung to is revivified and represented in the epic Paradise Lost as well. Andrew Miller in 1981 wrote John Milton and The English Revolution—A Study in the Sociology of Literature, reading “As against both the half-feudal notions of the Presbyterians and the utopianism of the Levellers, the third “independent’ position provides both a clear theoretical rationale for early bourgeois society and a specific rationale for the Independents’ own seizure of power.” (Miller, 1981. 204) As a progressive puritan, Milton had faith in man’s reason and right exercise of moral choice, in gradual enlightenment through free inquiry and discussion, and in the ultimate invincibility of truth. He was still splendidly confident in England and God’s Englishmen as the standard-bearers of reformation.(Bush, 1949, 1977. p.9) Although the revived courage and confidence that animated the Second Defense (1654), had vanished by the spring of 1660, on the very eve of the Restoration, Milton published and republished in enlarged form The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth which revealed his firm vision of utopia in England. Though he set forth a scheme for a new republican constitution, the main interest of the tract seems emotional for us today. We recognize the fearlessness of the defender of the regicides in calling attention to himself, in denouncing kingship and urging a republic, at a time when everyone knew what was coming soon like the Restoration. For the Restoration meant the end of Milton’s dream of Christ’s kingdom on earth, the end of all that he had worked for, the last twenty years. The loss of his early militant faith in making his heroic poems, however, made Paradise Lost become sadder and wiser and stronger only to reveal the aspects of utopia in vision in literary work. (Bush, 1949, 1977. Pp.10-11) Utopia is an idea for the place or situation which might not be equal to a specific or proper name. Etymologically, utopia is ‘outopos’ in Greek signifying no place, or ‘eutopos’ signifying good place. Prefix ‘ou’ is equal to ‘no’ and ‘eu’, good or kind. ‘Topos’ is similar to place, region, position. So, ‘utopia’ implies in English no region, no place or good region, good place. In this etymological sense, utopia is nowhere or if such a place were existing it should be the ideal place which is the best to live or the most beautiful region to sight which no place is comparable with. John Milton cherished the utopian vision in his era. In terms of literary criticism, it is said that since Aristotle, traditional literary theory has been classified into mimetic criticism focusing on reality, pragmatic criticism focusing on reader, expressive criticism focusing on author, and objective criticism focusing on literary work or text (Abrams, 1993, 39-42). But, in early 1980s Stephen Greenblatt came to inaugurate ‘new historicism’ as a mode of literary criticism and published Renaissance Self-fashioning. From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: Chicago U. P., 1980), which has influenced academic literary criticism from that time so far up to today. (Literary Theory Today. Ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992). Greenblatt is considered a key figure in the shift from literary poetics to cultural poetics and from textual interpretation to contextual interpretation in U.S. English departments in the 1980s and 1990s. (Leitch,Vincent. Ed. (2001). P. 2250) New historicism is regarded by many to have had an impact on every traditional period of English literary history. The New historicism is praised as a collection of practices employed by critics to gain a more comprehensive understanding of literature by considering it in historical context while treating history itself as historically contingent on the present in which it is constructed.(Greenblatt, Stephen, 2005. The Greenblatt Reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp.1–3.) As stated by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, the approach of new historicism has been "the most influential strand of criticism over the last 25 years, with its view that literary creations are cultural formations shaped by the circulation of social energy." (Lucasta Miller, 2005. "The human factor". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 March 2012.) He has also said that “My deep, ongoing interest is in the relation between literature and history, the process through which certain remarkable works of art are at once embedded in a highly specific life-world and seem to pull free of that life-world. ". ("Greenblatt Named University Professor of the Humanities". Harvard University Gazette. 21 September 2000. Retrieved 2 March 2012.) Greenblatt's works with Catherine Gallagher on new historicism, in other words, cultural poetics include Practicing New Historicism (2000) in which he discussed how the anecdote appears as the touch of the real and Towards a Poetics of Culture (1987), in which he asserted that the question of how art and society are interrelated, as posed by Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson, cannot be answered by appealing to a single theoretical stance. (Cadzow, Hunter; Conway, Alison; Traister, Bryce, 2005. "New Historicism". Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Retrieved 2 March 2012.) Renaissance Self-Fashioning and the Introduction to the Norton Shakespeare are regarded as good examples of Greenblatt's application of new historicist practices. (Greenblatt, 2005. The Greenblatt Reader. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 1–3.) He is also co-founder of the literary-cultural journal REPRESENTATIONS, which often publishes articles by new historicists. His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare. Literature and history, since old times, had closely related each other on the base of either competitiveness or complementariness. So, it is properly said that in study of literature, history plays an important role, and that in discussion of history, literature is made as a subject of discussion. Though, these two fields gradually began to be separated since the sixteenth century, and each field was established as independent science. It is the nineteenth century that old ‘historicism’, what is called traditionalism, appeared and made the two fields getting closer again. Particularly, a French literary critic Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine declared in the Preface to History of English Literature, (1863) that literary works are not simple and individual amusements or lonely caprice of excited brain, but a record of contemporary custom as well as an expression of a contemporary spirit. (Taine, Hippolyte-Adolphe. "Introduction to History of English Literature." Criticism: The Major Texts. Ed. W.J. Bate. New York: Harcourt, 1970. 500-507.). It can be said that since then, older historicism which is compared with Greenblatt’s ‘new historicism’ was revived in the Western literary criticism. The growth of the significance of history in the nineteenth century has made literary history be understood as a total and integrate record which can reflect the developing spirit and mind of a nation. As the twentieth century started and formalism was introduced to the academic arena, however, history came to be disregarded in the literary critical field. Since 1930s, when the high wave of New Criticism in the U.S.A rushed into the universities, traditional historians were hiding themselves without any words. Starting from the apex of 1950s, New Criticism was declining in its influencing vigor in 1960s when new literary critical trends such as Archetype criticism, Reader Response criticism, Deconstruction, Feminism and the like, keenly competed with one another for the leading position of literary critical world. In the result, historians were pushed many decades behind, spanning from the early twentieth century until 1980s. In 1980s, some literary critics challenged to predict returning of history on the literary field, which has made history be newly evaluated on ‘new historicism’ base that is different from previous literary critical viewpoints. Taken concrete instances, in 1984 Herbert Lindenberger declared “history is vigorously returning”(Lindenberger, Herbert. “Toward a New History in Literary Study.” Profession: Selected Articles from the Bulletins of the Association of Department of English and the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. New York: MLA, 1984. 16-23.), and the same year E.D. Hirsch, Jr. insisted “criticism based on history is the newest and most valuable” and demonstrated that it is time to return to historical criticism. (Hirsch, E. D., Jr. “Back to History.” Criticism in the University. Ed. Gerald Graff and Reginald Gibbons. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1985. 189-97) Along with the demonstrative challenges mentioned above, in early 1980s, New Historicism emerged for the first time and began to show itself as a newly fashioned mode of literary criticism. Stephen Greenblatt in his “Resonance and Wonder”(Ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan. Literary Theory Today. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992. 74-90.) opposed older historicism’s such attitudes defined in the American Heritage Dictionary as a) their belief that processes are at work in history that man can do little to alter, b) their theory that the historian must avoid all value judgments in his study of past periods or former cultures, and c) their veneration of the past and of tradition. On the contrary to older historicism, one of the assumptions taken from new historicism is that nothing is unchangeable in the world but truths and human nature. Greenblatt prefers to regard his own critical attempt as cultural poetics in order to highlight his concern with literature and arts integrated with other social practices that, in their complex interactions, make up the general culture of an era. In his writings on Renaissance related to some parts of the 16th and 17th centuries, Greenblatt’s recurrent critical tactics are to initiate his essay by telling an anecdote, or by referring to a text or cultural object that seems remote from literature, to subject the selected item to a close reading and thick description designed to bring out the beliefs, norms, and rhetorical plays of power that are implicit in it and to apply that analysis so as to reveal similar cultural elements and configurations in literary texts of the same period. For example, Greenblatt reads a selection from Thomas Harriott’s (Oxford, ca.1560 –. London, 2 July 1621) A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, written in 1588, as a representative discourse of the English colonizers of America which, without its author’s awareness, serves to confirm the Machiavellian hypothesis of the origin of princely power in force and fraud, yet nonetheless draws its audience irresistibly toward the celebration of that power. (Abrams,1993. 252; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Harriot). Greenblatt also asserted that Harriott tests the English power-structure, and that Harriot declares by recording in his Report the counter-voices of the American Indians who are being appropriated and oppressed by that power. Greenblatt then identified similar modes of power discourse and counter-discourse in the dialogues in Shakespeare’s Tempest between Prospero the appropriator and Caliban the expropriated native of his island, and goes on to find similar discursive configurations in the texts of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, 1and 2 and Henry V. “If it is the task of cultural criticism to decipher the power of Prospero, it is equally its task to hear the accents of Caliban.” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Culture” in Keesey, Donald, 1987, 2003 Contexts for Criticism, p. 441) In Greenblatt’s reading of those plays, the dialogue and events of the Henry plays reveal the degree to which princely power is based on predation, calculation, deceit, and hypocrisy. At the same time, Shakespeare’s plays do not hesitate to record the dissonant and subversive voices of Falstaff and various other representatives of Elizabethan sub-cultures. These counter-establishment revelations in Shakespeare’s plays, however, serve to maneuver their audience to accept and even glorify the power-structure to which that audience is itself subjected. Greenblatt’s general thesis is that in order to sustain its power, any durable political and cultural existing order allows and fosters subversive elements and forces, yet in such a way as more effectively to contain such challenges to the existing order. But, the new historicists insist on the capacity of subversive ideas and practices to effect social changes. New historicists criticize such view of the general triumph of controlling over the forces of subversion as pessimistic and quietest one.(Abrams, 1993. 253). Thus, New Historicism is said to be a school of literary theory which unites critical theory into easier forms of practice for academic literary theorists of the 1990s and since. A number of British scholars have adopted Cultural materialism as their mode of new historicism of Marxist orientation. They insisted that a culture and its literary products are always to an important degree conditioned by the real material forces and relations of production in their historical era. They were particularly interested in the political significance, and especially the subversive aspects and effects, of a literary text in the theater and the cinema and in its altering interpretation and treatment by later literary critics. Cultural materialists stressed that their criticism is itself oriented toward political intervention in their own era, in an express commitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender, and class. (Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield, Forward to Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism, 1985 in Abrams, 253) Similar views are expressed by those American exponents of the new literary history who are political activists. Some of them claim that if new historicists limit themselves to describing social domination and exploitation in literary texts of the past, but they stop short of a commitment to renovate the present social order, they have been co-opted into complying with the politically aloof formalism of the types of literary criticism that they set out to displace.(Abrams, 253) The new historicism is also related to Cultural studies which is a recent but very rapidly growing cross-disciplinary enterprise. The name of ‘Cultural studies’ designates the critical analysis of both the production and reception of all forms of cultural institutions, processes, and products. Among these, literature counts as merely one of many types of symbolic constructions. A chief concern is to identify the role, and the historical changes, of the social, economic, and political forces and power-structures that produce, sustain, and propagate the meanings, truth, value, and relative status of diverse cultural phenomena and their institutions including the institutions of traditional literary production and study, and even of their own field of cultural study. While, “Greenblatt points out that cultural poetics will quickly dissolve the formalist’s distinction between what’s ‘within’ and what’s ‘outside’ the text. Further, though Greenblatt admits his own writings may have given the impression that art simply reinforces the boundaries of its culture, he recognizes that art sometimes challenges these boundaries, becoming thereby a ‘transgressive force’ that may open the way to intervention in our own cultural scene.” (Keesey, Donald. 1987, 2003, p. 436). It seems to me that new historicism still has vigorous influence on academic literary critical environment even in the beginning of twenty-first century. In his paper it is assumed by the writer that the original knowledge of Adam and Eve’s in Paradise Lost is basic in all kinds of human culture and civilization.

…only add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add faith, Add virtue, patience, temperance, add love, By name to come called charity, the soul Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loth To leave Paradise, but shalt possess A Pradise within thee, happier far. (PL.Bk XII;581-87)