The Lists of Paradise Regained: An Economy of the Full and the Empty

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá

doi:10.17851/2317-2096.29.4.113-128

Abstract

This article works from Madeleine Jeay’s Le Commerce des Mots (2006), Umberto Eco’s Infinity of Lists (2009), and Bernard Sève’s Philosophie des Listes (2010) to understand the abundance of lists in John Milton’s Paradise Regained. The lists in Paradise Regained emerge from the following conditions: the fantasy of chaos remaining an unfulfilled horizon, the complicated coherence among things escaping the worst disorder, and the tortuous cohesive power of analogy barely unifying a worldview by holding the chaos of reality at bay. In sum, the lists in the short epic would mark, as a manifestation, the trace, like the shadow, of the intractable fallen world within the very act of worldliness (much like the creation of an alternative Christian ethos), always leaving a space of nothingness necessarily paradoxical and in some ways astonishingly so.

Highlights

As listas no curto poema épico marcariam, por meio de uma manifestação, o traço, como uma sombra, do intratável mundo pós-queda dentro do próprio ato de “mundanização”, sempre deixando um espaço do nada necessariamente paradoxal e, de certa forma, surpreendente
The lists in Paradise Regained emerge from the following conditions: the fantasy of chaos remaining an unfulfilled horizon, the complicated coherence among things escaping the worst disorder, and the tortuous cohesive power of analogy barely unifying a worldview by holding the chaos of reality at bay
Whereas literature is an ancient enterprise, through which humans seek to understand how reality is constructed by making sense of the world at large, literary criticism serves the purpose of perusing verbal works of art from a wide range of perspectives to find out the claims to truth contained in them about humanity and the world

Summary

Introduction

As listas no curto poema épico marcariam, por meio de uma manifestação, o traço, como uma sombra, do intratável mundo pós-queda dentro do próprio ato de “mundanização” (muito parecido com a criação de um éthos cristão alternativo), sempre deixando um espaço do nada necessariamente paradoxal e, de certa forma, surpreendente.

Results

Conclusion