Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T13:57:53.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Humanities of Scale: Marxism, Surface Reading—and Milton

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Crystal Bartolovich
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

John Milton only enters Slavoj Žižek's in defense of lost causes through a passing reference—to Satan—but in the history of unlikely attempts to draw victory from the jaws of defeat Milton's response to the Restoration ranks high by any standard (345). In 1660, when almost everyone else associated with the revolutionary government was trying to look as innocuous as possible, Milton instead wrote The Ready and Easy Way, a defense of republicanism, published it, then republished it, even as Charles II was on his way back to England. Why make such a seemingly futile, potentially life-threatening gesture? The most interesting answer might be that The Ready and Easy Way is the political equivalent of Walter Benjamin's stunning assessment of art in “The Task of the Translator”: “No poem is intended for the reader …” (253). From this point of view, all great human gestures and accomplishments belong to eternity: they are enacted or produced because they intersect with truth. We can participate in their truth, but that is our good fortune, not their purpose.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 127 , Issue 1 , January 2012 , pp. 115 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Apter, Emily, and Freedgood, Elaine. Afterword. Best and Marcus, Way 139–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Selected Writings. Vol. 1. Ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. 253–63. Print.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Best and Marcus, Way 1–21.Google Scholar
Best, Stephen, and Marcus., Sharon, eds. The Way We Read Now. Spec. issue of Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–148. Print.Google Scholar
Bosteels, Bruno. Badiou and Politics. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Fish, Stanley. “Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton's Areopagitica.” Re-membering Milton. Ed. Nyquist, Mary and Ferguson, Margaret. New York: Methuen, 1987. 234–54. Print.Google Scholar
Holy Bible. New York: Books, n.d. Print. King James Vers.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347–60. Print.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Kendrick, Christopher. Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form. New York: Methuen, 1986. Print.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. “Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.” Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Vol. 3. New York: International, 1975. 133–45. Print.Google Scholar
Milton, John. Areopagitica. Milton, Complete Poems 716–49.Google Scholar
Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Hughes, Merritt. Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957. Print.Google Scholar
Milton, John. The Ready and Easy Way. Milton, Complete Poems 880–99.Google Scholar
Nealon, Christopher. “Reading on the Left.” Best and Marcus, Way 22–50.Google Scholar
Peet, Richard, Robbins, Paul, and Watts, Michael J., eds. Global Political Ecology. New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.Google Scholar
Peters, John. Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter.” Sixty-Seven Tales. New York: Gramercy, 1990. 465–77. Print.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1983. Print.Google Scholar
Smith, Neil. “Contours of a Spatialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale.” Social Text 33 (1992): 54–81. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value.” In Other Worlds. New York: Routledge, 1987. 154–78. Print.Google Scholar
Žižek, Slavoj. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso, 2008. Print.Google Scholar