[Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson

[JD Fleming]

Surely, indeed, the vast majority of contemporary Milton criticism is heavily intentionalist. It doesn't follow, however, that there's nothing wrong with that. Still less with bio-criticism.

_SA_ is a highly productive text, in this connection, since scholarship about it constantly superimposes a Milton-intentionalism on a Samson-intentionalism. (As I have argued in print.) JDF
 
----- Original Message -----
From: "Hannibal Hamlin" <hamlin.hannibal at gmail.com>
To: "John Milton Discussion List" <milton-l at lists.richmond.edu>
Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2009 10:26:23 AM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific
Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson



All this back and forth about whether Fish is a card-carrying intentionalist seems a little odd to me. Is this really still a live issue? Surely we have long since moved beyond Barthes, Foucault, and the death of the author. How, for instance, can one reconcile the preoccupation of so many Miltonists with Milton's theology (via De Doctrina) with a belief that the author's intention is a fallacy, projection, what have you? I'm not sure there is any other author in history whose intentions were so obviously at the forefront of his work (which is not to say that determining them precisely is at all straightforward). What of Milton's prose works, with which so many critics are involved? Would anyone really argue that we cannot or should not try to determine the polemical intention of Milton's polemical prose? Moreover, why do so many writers, including major critics, continue to produce biographies if we are done with intention? Obviously, we want to avoid theoretical naivety, but slinging around the label "intentionalist" as if it were automatically daming seems equally naive. 
  
Hannibal 
  
  
  


  
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 9:11 AM, Michael Gillum < mgillum at unca.edu > wrote: 


Fish wrote  _Surprised by Sin_ in (I suppose) 1965-66, before continental 
Theory had made much of an impact in the US. New Criticism was still very 
influential. If Fish made an effort to avoid intentionalist language in SbS, 
I suspect that would reflect the influence of Wimsatt rather than Barthes. 
But SbS is evidently intentionalist in spirit. Fish was trying to get at 
intention by discussing features of the text and how they shape the 
responses of what he posits as a typical reader. I don't recall whether he 
ever slipped into the overt intentionalism that marks _How Milton Works_. 

Did/does Fish have a particular respect for Milton grounded in religious 
belief that led him to treat Milton's poetry in a historical-intentionalist 
way and to avoid subjecting it to the various fashionable maneuvers by which 
he scrambled to the top of the profession? 

Michael 





On 5/6/09 11:47 PM, "Harold Skulsky" < hskulsky at smith.edu > wrote: 

> I have had time to read only Stanley Fish's little talk (on four things 
> one can do with SA). There is nothing particularly arresting in it, as 
> far as I can see, and certainly nothing new. But I would be much obliged 
> if someone have the kindness to explain the miraculous transformation on 
> display here. 
> 
> The Fish of yore I knew and despised was a fellow traveler of Rorty at 
> his nihilistic worst, given to shamelessly outré manipulations of 
> whatever text was at his mercy ‹ in short, the phenomenally popular 
> operator of a three-card monte game whose time had come. The Fish on 
> display in the current little talk is a cuddly elder statesman, a 
> venerable teddybear of old-fashioned historical intentionalism (is 
> Hirsch still with us?), gently rapping the knuckles of anachronists and 
> other poachers in the margins of other men's books, and leaving behind a 
> tinkle of mild but affectionate laughter. Perhaps the miraculous 
> transformation is merely another (unremarkable) reminder that what goes 
> around comes around. Still, I can't resist the suspicion that there is 
> something afoot here ‹ something important that eludes me. 
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-- 
Hannibal Hamlin 
Associate Professor of English 
The Ohio State University 
Burkhardt Fellow, 
The Folger Shakespeare Library 
201 East Capitol Street SE 
Washington, DC 20003 
hamlin.22 at osu.edu/ 
hamlin.hannibal at gmail.com 

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-- 
James Dougal Fleming
Associate Professor
Department of English
Simon Fraser University

"das Fragwuerdige zu sehen"