My Abstract: Re-Orienting Milton

So I found this Conference in Tokyo talking about East-West, cross-cultural ties in literature and art looking for papers due last week. Sooo... I sent in an abstract. Professor Burton and lots of family and friends helped a ton with the polishing, but here's the final product:

An oriental reading of Paradise Lost and other writings resolves certain longstanding paradoxes in Milton's great works and reorients readers to his initial and intended meaning. Such paradoxes have come about due to gradual changes in our own culture resulting in an ultimate disconnect from the original culture and paradigm of Milton's time and place. A specific cross-culture norm that existed in both the Far East and in the West at the time Milton was writing was a value placed on what Western culture now condemns and terms the "passive." After WWII, our culture shifted out of this value system while China remained the same, making our reading of Paradise Lost and other Miltonic works imperfect and biased. 

By valuing the passive in the same way as Eastern culture while reading Milton's great works, we not only eliminate some of the false assumptions on which the West's Anglocentric view has founded arguments about Milton's culture but also recover the intended meaning of his work. One such assumption is that heroism is parallel with action. This assumption is the foundation of the all too common Romanticizing of Satan in Paradise Lost. As Satan is the most active, ambitious character in Milton's work, many critics have made the mistake of setting him as a Romantic hero; however, acknowledging the centrality of passivity in Milton's work (and perhaps in the Christian message itself) undermines the romanticizing of Satan as a character. In other words, by Romanticizing Paradise Lost (or aligning it with the foreign and exotic), this de-Romanticizes Satan.

Keywords: Paradise Lost, Orientalism, Romanticism

Milton: Torn Between Two Worlds

"And if [ministers] keep their learning by some potent sway of nature, 'tis a rare chance, but their devotion most commonly comes to that queasy temper of lukewarmness that gives a vomit to God himself..."

 This interpretation of Revelation 3:16 given by Milton in his treatise "Of Reformation" might have hit audiences like this hits us:

Milton pulled no punches when it came to condemning the aristocracy of the Church. I think it's safe to say that he was not in agreement with the top-heavy authority in Church or State. He definitely took a very vocal stand against it and this is what separated him from very recent Renaissance culture and concept of the self. (For reference of how rulers were expected to be treated, see the Introduction to the King James Bible published shortly before in 1611. Nice and flowery.)

On the other hand, the Romantics were said to think of the self in more free terms as "always independent from society and effectively independent from God" (Stevens, 263). Was Milton the first Romantic then? Stevens argues "nowhere is this conception of a transcendent self . . . more accurately represented and valorized than in the figure of Milton's Satan" (Stevens, 263). The reason one critic, Paul Stevens, gives is that perhaps he may have in part agreed with these ideas of freedom, but that he did not "wholly" commit to the idea.

There is no denying the apparent contradiction in applying some of his own, most publicly lobbied values to the culturally acknowledged embodiment of evil itself. But could that be because he, himself was conflicted?

Stevens, Paul. "Discontinuities in Milton's Early Public Self-Representation." Huntington Library Quarterly. Volume 51. Issue 4 (1988): 260-280. Web. Oct. 8. 2013.