Adapting Similes: Metalepsis and Narrative in The Apple and Paradise Lost

Abstracts

The critical traditions generated by the epic similes and metaphors of Paradise Lost demonstrate how the paradigm of Miltonic certainty has guided interpretation, and once more, the conflict between Bentley and Pearce both sets and exemplifies the pattern. In Milton’s “Paradise Lost”: A New Edition (1732), Bentley objected to the metaphors in Paradise Lost on the grounds of incongruity. Faced with the seeming inappropriateness of the epic similes at the end of Book 4, Bentley huffs “What are sheaves bound up in a Barn to the Phalanx, that hem’d Satan? Where’s the least Similitude? Besides to suppose a Storm in the Field of Corn, implies that the Angels were in a ruffle and hurry about Satan, not in regular and military Order” (sig. T4v). The metaphors offend Bentley’s sense of what constitutes an appropriate or legitimate comparison, and so he often either emends them or tries to drop them altogether. Responding to Milton’s comparison of “the flying Fiend” to ships far off (2.636–43), Bentley unleashes his usual scorn: “This long and tedious Comparison is so silly here and pedantical, quite improper for the Place; that I am willing to believe it spurious, and to charge the Editor with it, as often before” (sig. I3v). What really bothers Bentley is that everything takes place in the dark, and so he concludes his objections with this rhetorical question: “And why is all this done Nightly, to contradict the whole Account?” (sig. I3v).

Teaching Paradise Lost:Radical Contingency, Comparative Studies, and Community Engagement W. Scott Howard (bio) This essay connects a reading of Paradise Lost to an exhortation for the field of Milton studies, reflects upon my recent pedagogic activities at the University of Denver, and offers suggestions for teaching that emphasize comparative studies and community engagement.1 My work here derives from my teaching at all levels (from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students) at the dynamic intersections of my community's contiguous cohorts. My argument is this: Paradise Lost is a work of radical contingency beyond Milton's control that likewise exceeds our best efforts to grasp the whole poem, thereby engendering an open work in a vital field of endless variations upon the text's history of adaptation, interpretation, and production. Milton scholars and early modernists should therefore subordinate their desires to control the text (via established critical methods) to the work's generative legacy of artistic collaborations (among authors, editors, musicians, painters and printers, translators and typographers, et al.). Comparative studies across disciplines may be energized in meaningful ways for twenty-first-century students through community-engaged practices that amplify the poem's inherent openness to diversity, multimodality, and transferrable skills. We should celebrate the epic's living legacy through [End Page 231] spontaneous acts of open-access knowledge sharing and experiential learning that could be transformational for the path forward for literary studies. Within the limited scope of this essay's appearance in this cluster, my focus for comparative studies and community engagement will concern literary adaptations of Paradise Lost with particular emphasis given to the multimedia fields of book arts and letterpress printing. ________ Great works of literary art are so much greater than any individual or collective work of scholarship. Indeed, such classics are more than the sum of their parts at every moment in their journeys through time: from their engagements with their source materials and historical moments to their processes of inspiration, composition, revision, production, distribution, exchange, adaptation, interpretation, remediation, and translation.2 Such texts are beyond the control of their authors and audiences because their complexities escape capture and conversion; such classics are vibrant, open works that "display an intrinsic mobility, a kaleidoscopic capacity to suggest themselves in constantly renewed aspects."3 We should embrace this vital spirit of the open work's radical contingency. By radical, I mean a fundamental concern for and critique of the linguistic roots of reality; by contingency, I mean chance affinities among materials and methods that are neither designed nor foreseen—yet still possible due to either present or absent accidents, conditions, or forces. Paradise Lost is certainly intricate, but it is not "designed like a complex clock."4 Paradise Lost is a poem of baroque asymmetrical structures and signal escapes engendered by numerous discontinuities within and across the work's individual books as well as among the many paratexts added to the poem after the first three issues of the 1667 ten-book first edition.5 Considering these countless edits, revisions, and chance variables involved in the epic's journey from the 1667 edition to the 1674 twelve-book second edition, we should read, discuss, and teach Paradise Lost as a work of radical contingency that emerges from collaborative and collective efforts, including the text's dictation, transcription, revision, and preparation for printing and distribution, as William Poole's Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (2017) thoroughly demonstrates. We should celebrate the work's multimodal legacy in the spirit of Blake's illuminated poem that strives to correct Milton's vision by breaking apart his overdetermined selfhood.6 Numerous kindred literary adaptations of Paradise Lost reimagine and refashion the poem's materials and methods for modern audiences, such as Erin Shields's Paradise Lost (2018); Danny Snelson's RADIOS (2016); Pablo Auladell's Paradise Lost [End Page 232] (2014); Ronald Johnson's RADI OS (1977); and John Collier's Milton's Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (1973), just to name a few.7 Milton's paradoxical refrain, "know to know no more," underscores these principles and reflections in ways that exceed ready explanations—notwithstanding the best efforts of countless editors and scholars...

WORK of art has its own validity as something that has been fashioned and created; one of the main functions of criticism at all times is to state and rediscover what the work of art actually is. But a work of art not only has this type of validity-it also serves as a touchstone of intellectual and cultural history. It both influences the course of cultural history and serves to mark, through the changing aspects of criticism it undergoes, the new elements and changes in that history.l Paradise Lost has permanently influenced the course of cultural history, and serves as a touchstone of the changing directions and eddies of subsequent history. From the viewpoint of the orthodox-minded critic (one who believes that there exists a permanent core of ascertainable truth guaranteed not only by reason but also by revelation), Paradise Lost undergoes a radically different evaluation than from the viewpoint of a more secular-minded critic who does not regard the material that Milton presents as having any connection with factuzal history at all. The second critic regards the material that Milton presents as a myth that, for historical reasons outside the question of the authenticity of the story altogether, once had a sacred character. From' the viewpoint of such scholarship the ideal way to handle Paradise Lost is not to commit oneself to the truth or falsehood of the historical ma-

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

The simile is a prominent literary device in David Jones's 1937 First World War epic In Parenthesis, appearing at a rate of about 1.25 times per page throughout the text. This article focuses on two key functions of the simile in In Parenthesis: the simile as a nod to the genre of classical epics and the simile as a clarifying tool. First, I demonstrate how In Parenthesis draws on themes and structures from epic similes in works like T he Iliad and Paradise Lost, juxtaposing Jones's unheroic combatants against epic heroes. Second, I contend that a stylistic shift occurs in Part 7, the narrative becoming less opaque (if, at the same time, embracing the mythic). This shift is driven, I contend, by similes deployed with increased frequency and transparency and is supplemented by a subtle shift in narrative perspective.

In this chapter, I will show how the uncertainties created and symbolized by Milton’s epic similes and metaphors can be found in the smallest details of Paradise Lost as well as the larger narrative. In many ways, the crux of the poem is a small word—“or”—which constitutes the DNA, as it were, of the poem’s competing narratives. Albert C. Labriola has proposed that “all” constitutes “the essence of Paradise Lost,” by which Labriola means what he perceives as the extraordinary unity of the poem.1 Labriola’s statement, however, that “all” constitutes “a deep structure that generates, among others, both interrogatory and declarative surface structures, a linguistic universal implying any number of particular reformulations” (42), applies equally well to the omnipresence of “or,” which is, of course, the undoing of “all” since unresolved choice implicitly deconstructs the imposition of unity called for by “all.” Labriola is not wrong in his assessment of “all”s importance, but we need to balance the drive toward unity with the equal drive toward duality and incertitude. In other words, although one must recognize the presence of a strong, totalizing impulse within the poem, a desire for unity and a movement toward organicism, one also needs to recognize that this impulse is countered by an equally powerful counter-tendency toward undoing unity and toward unresolved choices leading to aporias, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally.

Performance and Popular Culture

This article aims to explore John Milton’s poetic theme and style in his epic poem “Paradise Lost” Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse. It explores the biblical story of the fall of man, focusing primarily on the rebellion of Satan and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. From the background above, this research aims to explain the theory of a thematic and stylistic analysis of John Milton's Paradise Lost. The method used is a literature review, which includes the analysis and evaluation of scientific articles and journals that are relevant to the research problem. This research explains the thematic study of the poem; we analyzed themes and gave significant clues about them. Finally, we tackled the style used by the author in the poem. Concerning the style, we have noticed that Milton's writing style in Paradise Lost is characterized by its elaborate use of figurative language, including epic similes, vivid imagery, and intricate metaphors.

In Paradise Lost, allusions to alchemy are mostly evident in the third book, where Satan, on his way to ruining God’s wondrous creation of earth and man, passes through the region of the sun. Part of the orb’s “all-cheering” effect is to “shoot invisible virtue even to the deep,” reaching the inner nature of bodies in the surrounding universe. Remote as the “arch-chemic sun” is from earth, it functions as a first alchemist whose rays are naturally mixed with terrestrial moisture to produce “here in the dark so many precious things/of colour glorious and effect so rare.” This divinely ordained and natural alchemy stands in stark contrast to two other rival pursuits for rare metal in Paradise Lost. Firstly, there is the brigade of fallen angels in the first book, who are led by Mammon towards earthly riches, digging into a volcanic hill whose “glossy scurf” is a clear sign “that in his womb was hid metallic ore,/The work of sulphur.” Secondly, there is the future fallen race of man who, a few verses later in the same book, is likewise led by Mammon to rifle “the bowels of their mother earth/For treasures better hid.” In contrast to this sky-earth alchemy descending from a divine source, Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of art sees a phenomenological continuum extending in the opposite direction, from earth to Greek temple, godhead, sky, and sun. These last celestial entities are brought into being through the ramifying potential of the human work of art, the Greek temple that puts in relief the presence of the god within its sacred precinct as well as the natural elements surrounding it. In this process, earth endures as the unfathomable aspect of a constantly arising and unconcealed world. Can Heidegger’s work of art, which ultimately engenders even God’s firmament, be reconciled with Milton’s alchemical allegory, which depicts God’s heavenly rays engendering the earth’s lesser riches? Heidegger’s philosophy of art implies the sky and the godhead as products of mankind’s ceaseless creativity working upon an ultimately impenetrable earth, whereas Milton’s alchemical allegory condemns mankind’s futile attempt to emulate God’s supreme art of engendering life in earth. And yet, striking resemblances emerge between the two paradigms as they are brought together in a comprehensive gestalt of creation.

Harold Skulsky, Milton and the Death of Man: Humanism on Trial in Paradise Lost, London, Associated University Presses, Newark, University of Delaware Press, 2000, pp. 262, hb. £35, ISBN: 00874137195The dramatic gestures of the courtroom, rather than a more predictable academic mode of delivery, provides the stylistic momentum for Harold Skulsky's testing and often intriguing interrogation of the intellectual framework and achievements (both moral and aesthetic) of Milton's Paradise Lost. The central thesis of this study is that the poem's inconsistency, and ultimate failure, as an exercise in rational 'humanistic theodicy' lies at the very heart of its success as a work of art. Casting Milton as the human advocate of an omnipotent but problematically remote client, Skulsky also implicitly exploits the logical rigour and moral potency of Paradise Lost as a means of demolishing the 'body of inchoate theories and sentiments that goes by the name of humanism' (dustjacket). Seeking to blend literary criticism with philosophical analysis, he also places particular emphasis upon the power of expressive and persuasive strategies of rhetoric as a means of shaping and (no less importantly) warping the logic of ideas. Rhetoric for Milton, it is implied, was not necessarily regarded as a route towards absolute and divine truth but rather as the only means left to the isolated and faltering poet of making some sense of a fallen and fragmented world. The book is cogently divided into four large chapters. In the first, it is explained why the metaphor of pleading God's case is so apt and meaningful for a study of Paradise Lost; and why epic narrative is especially amenable to a legalistic dissection of its moral purpose. In the second (and perhaps most informative) chapter, Skulsky offers an enlightening and admirably concise survey of the evolution of concepts of freewill in Western thought, via the writings of Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Valla, Pomponazzi, Erasmus, Molina, and others. The third chapter explains how Milton utilized his account of both the Creation and the Fall as a means of interrogating the efficacy of God's ways. At the same time, it is emphasised that the Creation, although engendered by a traditionally male God, was essentially a powerfully maternal act - a perspective which ultimately allows Eve's maternity in the 'Dialogue of Reconciliation' to parallel God's original creativity. The fourth and concluding chapter explores the disturbing concept of God's hatred and reminds the reader of Milton's commitment to the idea of epic as 'tragedy writ large'. How, after all, in a court of law, does a loving God, or rather His hapless attorney, justify to the attentive jurors/readers His creation of that neatly antithetical Heaven, more commonly known as Hell? …

Reviewed by: Spenserian Moments by Gordon Teskey Paul J. Hecht Spenserian Moments. By Gordon Teskey. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2019. xiii+529 pp. $45; £36.95. ISBN 978–0–674–98844–6. Spenserian Moments collects essays from a thirty-year period, many substantially revised, into a volume that also contains approximately five chapters of entirely new material. The opening section of the book, where the new writing is concentrated, gives us a chance to see this esteemed critic of Milton and Spenser approach topics that we have not seen him approach before. Because many of the collected and revised essays have stood the test of time and deserve to be better known, the volume will therefore be valuable to Spenser scholars, to scholars relatively new to Spenser, and also to teachers and students. The last two kinds of reader may be drawn to Gordon Teskey because he is an extremely resourceful analogist, who supplies a great quantity of ways of framing and conceptualizing the workings of, especially, The Faerie Queene. Some of the best of these analogies—mountains with 'plenty of weather' (p. 12), or a chemical quincunx with freely floating electrons (p. 4)—are born of comparisons with Paradise Lost, the poem that has been the other steady focus of Teskeyʼs career. The centrality and power of his analogies show off Teskeyʼs devotion to teaching, which also explains the care and quality of his writing, learned but generous. Innovative analogy also shows off an approach to criticism that has much in common with the poetry he writes about. Since Teskey sees The Faerie Queene as a poem fundamentally and brilliantly resistant to scheme, he has allowed himself to use an approach built on 'moments', gathering a constellation of analyses and thought rather than a strict argumentative sequence. The result is consistently satisfying, [End Page 279] often surprising, and at times provoking. A couple of highlights of the former two: an essay on 'thinking moments' shows Teskey in dazzling form, taking energy from Romantic views of Spenser, and aesthetic theory that extends from Plato to Hegel, Heidegger, and Adorno; an essay on death and allegory contains an unforgettable reading of the near-death of the Knight of Temperance in Book ii of 'The Faerie Queene. Where there is provocation, for me it comes from places where Teskey has allowed things to get either a little loose or a little too strict. Teskey can be brilliant about the sexual dynamics of Spenser, using gender as a large-scale structuring analogy for 'The Faerie Queene early in the book. However gender and sexuality do not reside in his work on Spenser in the same way that, say, Irish studies does—which has given us an excellent chapter in which he engages with this major area of new Spenser scholarship of the last few decades. So some remarks about women and sexuality—e.g. Acrasia, Elizabeth Boyle—are made as though there is not ongoing thinking about these topics as fierce as there is about Spenser and Ireland. Meanwhile, on the slightly too strict side of things, Teskey alludes to the sexual dynamics of the Aeneid as though that were a settled matter and not a site of ongoing debate. I will allow myself to pick one more bone: in the chapter on colonial allegories in Paris, an unexpected and delightful Spenserianʼs tour guide to the city, he disputes a manifesto made on behalf of non-Western works of art that was part of the ongoing effort by Paris to address its colonial past and its continuing status as capital of global art. Teskey is incensed by the way the manifesto conflates the rights of human beings and those of works of art, a conflation which he calls 'the height of absurdity' (p. 365). Nonetheless, I wonder: the decades Teskey has given to becoming a reader adequate to The Faerie Queene, an accomplishment so richly on display throughout this book, seem to reflect a devotion to art that is at the very least comparable to what a human being deserves. Why should not it be an appropriate task to treat works of art with...

예술작품과의 만남은 간단하게 설명할 수 없는 신비로움을 지니고 있다. 예술작품을 접하고서 우리는 커다란 충격을 받을 때도 있고, 심오한 깨우침을 얻을 때도 있다. 한 편의 소설이 사람들의 의식과 삶에 큰 영향을 주고, 시 한 구절이 인생을 변화시키기도 한다. 사진 한 장이 많은 이들에게 감동을 전해줄 뿐만 아니라, 세상을 바꿀 수도 있다는 것에 놀라기도 한다. 그러나 때때로 작품은 우리에게 완전히 무감각하게 다가오기도 한다. 심지어 같은 작품을 동시에 접하고서 사람들 간에 다르게 이해할 뿐만 아니라, 동일한 사람도 같은 작품에 대해서 시차를 두고서 다르게 이해하기도 한다. 예술은 자명성을 결핍하고 있으며 논쟁적인 주제라는 점은 의심의 여지가 없다. 이러한 논쟁에 대해 미적 주관주의가 널리 퍼져 있는 현재, 사람들은 작품이 아닌 주관의 심적 상태를 통해서 이를 해명하려는 것이 일반적인 방식이다. 그러나 개인의 미적 의식을 통해서 예술작품을 이해하는 관점은 편한 방식이기는 하지만 예술의 신비를 해명함에 있어서 분명한 한계가 있는 방식이다. 이는 작품 자체에 주목하는 방식이 아니라, 작품을 감상자 주관으로 환원하여 이해하는 방식이다. 단순하게 주체의 미적 경험으로 환원되지 않는 작품의 고유한 의미에 대한 해명은 예술이해를 위해서는 필수적인 요소이다. 예술작품이 미적 경험의 대상이라는 사실을 고려한다면, 예술을 미적 경험과 연관하여 이해하는 것은 분명히 중요한 방식이다. 그러나 작품은 개인의 미적 경험 이상의 고유한 의미를 내포하고 있기에 작품에 대한 해석은 예술이해에 있어서 필수적이다. 이 글은 예술작품의 이해에 있어서 단순하게 주관적인 미적 의식으로 환원되지 않는 고유한 예술작품에 대한 논의를 중심으로 예술경험을 해명하고자 한다. 특히 예술작품과의 만남이 일의적으로 규정되지 않는다는 것을 “미적 무한성(aesthetic infinity)”으로 규정하고, 미학이 탄생한 근대 이후, 이와 관련된 예술 철학자들의 사상을 살펴보고자 한다.Some mystique follows an encounter with a work of art that can not be explained simply with words. After an encounter with a work of art, people may experience a significant shock or profound realization. A novel may have significant effects on the consciousness of reader;s. One line of a poem may change a reader’s life forever. A photograph not only affects many of its viewers but may also change the world. People, however, may also be indifferent to a work of art from time to time. After two people simultaneously encounter a work of art, each may have different understandings of it. Even the same individual may have different understandings of a work at different points in their life. There is no doubt that understanding art is a controversial topic. In today’s world in which aesthetic subjectivism prevails, people generally attempt to approach this issue on the basis of subjective psychological states rather than works of art. However, understanding art through one’s individual aesthetic consciousness is clearly limited in explaining the mystique of art, despite this perspective’s convenience. This approach does not focus on a work of art itself but reduces and understands it based on the appreciator’s subjective ideas. One essential element of understanding art requires an explanation about the unique meanings of a work that are not simply reduced to the subject’s aesthetic experiences. If a work of art is an object of aesthetic experience, it is clearly important to understand it by connecting it to other aesthetic experiences. A work of art, however, contains unique meanings beyond an individual’s aesthetic experiences, which makes it essential to interpret the meaning of a work. This study intended to provide explanations about aesthetic experiences by focusing on discussions about unique works of art that cannot be reduced simply through one’s subjective aesthetic consciousness. Defining the concept of “aesthetic infinity”, which refers to an encounter with a work of art that cannot be defined in a single meaning, this study examined the related ideas of art philosophers since the birth of aesthetics.

The author focuses on one of the most striking phenomena of European cinema of the interwar period, a musical film and musical comedy in particular, which vividly declared itself in Poland in 1930 (almost simultaneously with the advent of sound cinema). The new film genre was developing rapidly, but the achievements of Polish cinema in this area are little known in Russia. Despite the fact that the technical capabilities were more than modest, the music of Polish composers performed by new Polish film stars shone on the screen — those artists (and often musicians) to whom the new genre brought fantastic success and left in the memory of the audience for many decades. Moreover, the creators were interested not only in musicals, but also in more “serious” musical genres, as well as various national and socio-cultural contexts. The article offers an introduction to the history and peculiarities of the development of the musical film genre in Poland during the interwar twentieth century, special emphasis is placed on film adaptations of Polish opera classics — S. Moniuszko’s operas Halka and The Enchanted Castle. Based on the historical and cultural approach and the study of film materials (as well as the press and a few scientific papers), various aspects of the work of composers and artists, as well as attitudes towards a new genre of criticism, are presented. The author emphasizes that since the creation of sound film in Poland, it has been considered a synthetic art form, where music has specific relationships with images and other acoustic elements. Musicals occupied an important place in Polish cinema of the interwar period, however, in addition to this direction, interesting works in the genre of short feature films using music, as well as opera films can be noted. The most famous film adaptation of the national opera was Halka directed by J. Gardan (1937), who invited outstanding Polish authors to cooperate (the music was adapted and completed by R. Palester, the dialogues by J. Iwaszkiewicz, and the script was created by L. Schiller). Numerous musical films have become valuable evidence of the era, capturing its socio-cultural landmarks, as well as artistic preferences and peculiarities of the existence of the musical art’s works.

The purpose of the research is to analyze popular examples of modern cinema music to determine the features of its interaction with various elements of screen text, taking into account the applied nature and applying various relevant approaches to the study of soundtracks. The research methodology consists in the application of a set of methods for theoretical analysis of film music, their interaction with internal and external factors of influence on the formation of the viewer’s image-emotional sphere in conditions of purposeful perception of the storyline of modern cinema. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that for the first time the peculiarities of the music functioning in modern cinema were analyzed, the main trends in the development of film music in the socio-cultural conditions of our time were revealed, and film music from the perspective of the viewer as a “non-ideal” evaluator of soundtracks in modern cinema was also considered. Conclusions. The article, using various methodological approaches, has proved that film music in the framework of interaction with screen text manifests itself as a significant tool, expanding the artistic space of the film. Film music can go beyond direct acoustic information, reflecting the narrative and conceptual components of the work of art as a whole. A practical example of the manifestation of modern film music is the use of timbral colours as an instrument for revealing the context of events, time, and the image of a hero; leitmotif; experiments with the technical side of sound through the expansion of the imaginary space of the screen. The main trends in the development of film music in the socio-cultural conditions of our time are due to the release of soundtracks beyond the boundaries of a practical film instrument. The modern soundtrack occupies a significant part of the cultural space of music and culture in general. This position is facilitated by the composer’s conceptual approach, the style integrity of the work and the relative independence of the soundtrack in the general cultural space. The rating of soundtracks is given by the audience and depends on their aesthetic preferences and the level of musical “experience”. Soundtracks must meet the requirements of modern cinema and common cultural space, which contributes to the success of the film.