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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... biblical proclamation , the texts of Milton and Blake exist in a unique rela- tion to temporality , referring equally to something that happened , some- thing that will happen , and something that happens only and always in the instant ...
... biblical nar- rative of creation by adding deictics and second - person address , Blake punctuates his mythologizing narratives with ' here ' and ' now ' and ' Mark well my words ' ; reminding us always of the subjectivity and ...
... biblical myth of cre- ation began as sacred authority and lapsed into conventional allusion , it has become , perhaps involuntarily , a subtext and a well of imagery for modern linguistic and philosophical writing . Since the nineteenth ...
... biblical allusion is conspicuous in the German text , where Nietzsche chooses the unusual phrase Genesis der Sprache to refer to the origin of language , instead of the standard Ur- sprung der Sprache , which appears in the title of ...
... biblical roots of the word ' logical , ' the sentence may disintegrate into either a para- dox - the origin of language has nothing to do with logoi or words - or an ironic denial that the origin of words has anything to do with the ...
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 |
Other editions - View all
Creating States: Studies in the Performative Language of John Milton and ... Angela Esterhammer No preview available - 1994 |