Milton's Uncertain Eden: Understanding Place in Paradise LostThis study describes a variety of ways of thinking about place in the Renaissance and in Paradise Lost. Despite coming from different perspectives, they have in common the idea that the difficulty of the relationship of reciprocity that poetic subjects often expect from their environment destabilizes those subjects' understanding, not only of environment, but of themselves. The study explores destabilization as it affects aspects of the poem from Adam's sense of the landscape of Eden and the meaning of the Fall itself, to the relationship the ambiguous landscapes of Paradise Lost create between Adam and Eve, the poet and the reader; all of whom are struggling to make sense of the same problematically described places. To a surprisingly large extent, the description of prelapsarian Eden and the events that go on within it have in common a failed attempt to understand the nature of the surroundings. In observing the centrality and difficultly of this poetic discourse of place, the problem of place is found at the very heart of the Fall. |
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... function of the passage . Place has a moral function in this passage - because Eden always has a moral function - but its figural function overwhelms its moral function . This book's principal thesis is that in Paradise Lost as a whole ...
... function of singing is more complex , since it seems to be both a response to and a participation in creation . Thus singing must be placed ; its narrative function is not just about the relationship between God and Man , but also about ...
... functions of description is to record non - visual aspects of the world , and both an overly referential reading and a reading overly resistant to reference will miss that function . Thus de Man's warning functions as some- thing of an ...