Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and William BlakeAlthough the concept of the performative has influenced literary theory in numerous ways, this book represents one of the first full-length studies of performative language in literary texts. Creating States examines the visionary poetry of John Milton and William Blake, using a critical approach based on principles of speech-act theory as articulated by J.L. Austin, John Searle, and Emile Benveniste. Angela Esterhammer proposes a new way of understanding the relationship between these two poets, while at the same time evaluating the role of speech-act philosophy in the reading of visionary poetry and Romantic literature. Esterhammer distinguishes between the 'sociopolitical performative,' the speech act which is defined by a societal context and derives power from institutional authority, and the `phenomenological performative,' language which is invested with the power to posit or create because of the individual will and consciousness of the speaker. Analysing texts such as The Reason of Church-Government, Paradise Lost, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem, Esterhammer traces the parallel evolution of Milton and Blake from writers of political and anti-prelatical tracts to poets who, having failed in their attempts to alter historical circumstances through a direct address to their contemporaries, reaffirm their faith in individual visionary consciousness and the creative word – while continuing to use the forms of a socially or politically performative language. |
From inside the book
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... becomes , ironically , a ' system ' of the unique and contingent . While Austin's insights have been interpreted by many of his followers as a rule - governed system that allows individual utterances to function as illocutions , it is ...
... becomes most explicit when someone speaks ' as Prime Min- ister ' or as a trained professional . ' Johnson points out the irony of exclud- ing explicitly dramatic situations from a theory that undertakes to explore ' speech acts ' and ...
... become a subject for analysis when the text is expansive enough to create a world of verbal acts in a social context , and especially when the world within the text imitates an actual society , as in the realist novel or neoclassical ...
... become a constative reality ( it is cold ) . The illocutionary force of the lines is that of a threat , or perhaps a perverse promise , that the poet's dead hand will haunt the living reader , but in the act of reading the lines that ...
... becomes slippery because he wants to make performativity relative to both the lin- guistic order and the social order but seems unable to reconcile the two . He first attempts a rigorous linguistic definition , according to Performative ...
Contents
10 | |
16 | |
23 | |
31 | |
42 | |
48 | |
The J Myth | 54 |
3 | 65 |
5 | 119 |
Relations in the State of Innocence | 132 |
Relations in the State of Experience | 143 |
Naming in The Book of Urizen | 152 |
The Argument of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell | 158 |
A Song of Liberty | 167 |
Statements and States | 174 |
A Revision | 184 |
General and Special Inspiration | 70 |
Miltons Promise | 77 |
The Elision of the Performative | 85 |
The Performativity of Divine Speech | 99 |
Naming and Subjectivity | 110 |
A Division | 191 |
Creating States | 201 |
The Community of Phrases | 216 |
Index | 239 |
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Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and ... Angela Esterhammer No preview available - 1994 |