Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton's IronyWhy do we hate Milton's God? Victoria Silver reengages with a perennial problem in Milton studies, one whose genealogy dates back at least to the Romantics, but which finds its most cogent modern expression in William Empson's revulsion at Milton's God and Stanley Fish's defense. |
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... namely, the desire to transfigure fundamentally the meaning things have for us—to work out our salvation through words or, as the Investigations say, to show the fly the way out of the bottle.4 Irony for Milton is the expressive means ...
... namely, our pretension to something grander and finer than mere animal existence. For even as irony expresses the rueful if distinctive impulse to reflection or consciousness of ourselves as creatures, our very attempts at that ...
... namely, that their concern lies with the obscure causes of our condition. For even when we dignify human being by making our own effects the grand object of inquiry, there is the lurking suggestion that our study aims to repair ...
... namely, as an indictment operating upon him like necessity. And in such excruciation he speaks for many subsequent readers, who see Milton in Milton's God not so much for what the Father says condemning his creatures as for how he says ...
... namely, its perplexing amenability to the vagaries of interpretation, despite our presumption that it tells a positive, unequivocal truth. But if allegory can effectively bowdlerize the sense of a text, the presumption of irony can just ...