How Milton Works - Hardcover

Fish, Stanley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674004655 ISBN 13: 9780674004658

Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001

Synopsis

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time.

How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.

About this title

About the Author

Stanley Fish is Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His many books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing Too.

Reviews

erhaps more prominent in recent years as a controversial legal theorist (The Trouble with Principle), soldier in the culture wars (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too) and the highest-profile defector from Duke's star-packed '80s English department (he is now a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago), Fish forcefully reminds us that it is as a reader of John Milton that he first made his mark, with 1967's Surprised by Sin. That book not only revolutionized Milton criticism, but pioneered the notion of "reader response" as a critical tool. Three and a half decades later, in more than 500 pages of virtuosic close reading, Fish gives us a premodern Milton, in which every element vocabulary, syntax, line breaks is directed "from the inside out" toward divine truth. Beginning with the questions "What is Milton about?" "What is Milton's account of knowing and perception?" and "How is Milton to be read?" Fish rarely looks up from Milton's texts, but the details of his readings convey at all times the sweep of the poet's thought, the power of what Fish might call his "containment" of disparate impulses, the grandeur of his religious quest. Milton scholars will definitely have their summer reading cut out for them, but any reader interested in tracking an encounter across time of one bottomlessly inquisitive, endlessly skeptical 17th-century mind with a similarly oriented, 21st-century critic idiosyncratically charged with belief would be advised to stash this volume in their beach bag. (June 25) Forecast: Fish was recently profiled in the New Yorker, with How Milton Works receiving two quick mentions. Every academic collection will want the book, and Fish's extra-academic reputation should draw the canonically minded curious, though few will have previously encountered Surprised by Sin.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Acclaimed for more than 30 years as a great Milton critic, Fish still has much to teach. Here he dispels the confusion fostered in recent years by critics eager to convert the famed Puritan poet into a conflicted modern liberal, working out the tensions of his divided psyche in the drama of his spectacular art. Fish releases Milton from this Procrustean bed by restoring his integrity as a writer whose works expressed the timeless serenity of theological conviction. Read carefully, Milton's poetry and prose warn us against their own seductive charms. The true reader acquires the firm poise of testimony, resistant to all the blandishments of narrative excitement, poetic beauty, and rhetorical elevation. Inner sanctity transcends all external brilliance within Milton's aesthetic, premised upon a divine omnipotence that shines through all merely human or natural splendors. Though unfashionable, Fish's thesis proves remarkably luminous in explaining a wide range of Milton texts, from his sublime Paradise Lost to his polemical tracts. A masterful study indispensable for anyone who reads Milton. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The shadow of Fish's barbed reputation is far longer than that of the man or his work itself: he is better known now for the scandal surrounding Alan Sokal's hoaxing contribution to Fish's journal, Social Text, and Fish's own feeble response to it, than his once-revolutionary reader-response criticism. In the wake of the Sokal disaster, Fish has left the demoralized English department of Duke University for the University of Illinois, Chicago, whence comes this long study of Milton's theology and method a study Fish claims to have been writing since 1973. What students of Milton and readers of literary criticism will find refreshing is the low volume of jargon and poststructuralist lit-speak in this solidly argued work. Some may quarrel with his conclusions, but his erudition is indisputable. This work, which addresses the whole range of Milton's oeuvre in prose and poetry, asserts that the core of Milton's message is that "there is only one choice to be or not to be allied with divinity" and that the Fall that separated Satan from Heaven and Adam and Eve from Eden, is, paradoxically, the only source of action, politics, individuality, and poetry, including Milton's own. It is easy enough to quarrel with Fish's reading of certain lines or passages, but he has caught something about Milton's strange talent, its immobility and monumentality. What's more, Fish has done so with an intensity of close reading that would have been the envy not so much of today's poststructuralists despite Fish's self-avowed radicalism as of yesteryear's "close reading" critics, like Cleanth Brooks. Despite the professional faltering and failures that have preceded it, Fish's title is an eminently readable, provocative, and indispensable new study of one of our greatest poets. For most collections, especially academic libraries. Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0674004655
• ISBN 13: 9780674004658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 640