[Milton-L] "Making Milton Matter"???? was Smokey Mountain...

[Cristine Soliz]

2) might also be commodification.

-- 
Dr. Cristine Soliz
Visiting Assistant Professor
Colorado State University-Pueblo
Project Director, NEH Grant
http://dchumanities.org/
Area Chair Historical Fiction, SW Tex Pop Culture and Am Culture Assoc
Associate Scholar, Center for World Indigenous Studies
http://csoliz.com
csoliz at csoliz.com

> (1) “Defenses of poetry are seldom persuasive to anyone who isn't
> already inside the
> ramparts. Those persuaded don't need to be because they already are,
> and
> those who need to be persuaded will not be because the premises won't
> be
> intelligible to them.”
>
> (2) “I stress that Milton is both really, really good and not
> outdated because I hope to have 2-3 more
> decades in academe.”
>
> If I follow (1), it argues that there is no fact of the matter about
> Milton’s value and therefore no such thing as being persuaded that
> there is any such fact; to be “persuaded” that Milton matters, you
> just place yourself, or find yourself already placed, within the
> “ramparts” of a particular attitude community.
>
> If I follow (2), it argues that talk about Milton’s “real” value
> is really self-interested talk about his market value put out by people
> who owe their livelihood to selling him; if (2) didn’t mean this, it
> would be pointless in the current context, because it is totally
> irrelevant to the question on the table: how to bring home to students
> that Milton has value. (A commodity doesn’t have to be valuable to be
> salable, or salable to be valuable.)
>
> The standard name for position (1) is nihilism. The standard name for
> position (2) is relativism. Both are highly familiar, and indeed
> currently dominant, views about various domains of “value.” (In
> ethics, they are generally discussed under the umbrella of
> “noncognitivism.”) In debates about literature, despite their
> current prestige, they’ve been around for more than a century. They
> have been refuted many times, but they always come back in various
> covertly dogmatic forms. They are a badge of sophistication.
>
> So prevalent are they at this cultural moment, that students generally
> present themselves to us already saturated in both – walking the walk
> if not talking the talk. For better of worse, most teachers of
> literature are in the same condition, often without the slightest
> awareness of it. (One is reminded of the bourgeois gentilhomme, who was
> heartened to discover that he had been speaking prose all his live
> without knowing it.)
>
> This is no place to consider the validity of (1) and (2); but together
> they are familiar symptoms of the unhappy cultural condition Durkheim
> and Merton long ago diagnosed under the term “anomie.”  What should
> concern people interested in the future of Milton is not only their
> truth (they may yet turn out to be true) but their toxicity.
>
>
>
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