[Milton-L] Fish and Milton

[Michael Gillum]

I'm wondering if anyone has a reaction to my suggestion in the thread
"Symposium on Milton's Samson" that Fish has taken a different approach to
Milton than to literature in general. Has he accorded Milton a particular
sort of respect in not subjecting Milton's poetry systematically to the
corrosive effects of continental literary theory and his own extensions of
those procedures? If so, why? I am not pursuing this thesis with any high
degree of confidence; it is just a thought. This is what I wrote:

>Fish wrote  Surprised by Sin in (I suppose) 1965-66, before continental theory
made much of an impact in the US. New Criticism was still influential. If Fish
made an effort to avoid intentionalist language in SbS, I suspect that would
reflect the influence of Wimsatt more than Barthes. But SbS is evidently
intentionalist in spirit. I think 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
relatively overt intentionalism that marks How Milton Works.

>Did/does Fish have a particular respect for Milton, possibly 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?


--I do think Surprised by Sin offered a remarkably original way of reading
Paradise Lost and one that is still quite useful in its outline if not in
every detail of interpretation.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.richmond.edu/pipermail/milton-l/attachments/20090508/68ee424f/attachment.html