"Sad Experiment" in Paradise Lost: Epic Knowledge and Evental Poetics. (October 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: S, D
• Is Part Of: Exemplaria. Volume 26:Number 4(2014)
• Page Start: 368
• Page End: 388
• Publication Date: 2014-10
• Subjects: event -- experiment -- certainty -- experience -- probability -- John Milton -- Paradise Lost; European literature -- Renaissance, 1450-1600 -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Literature, Medieval -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Middle Ages -- Periodicals; 809.0205
• DOI: 10.1179/1041257314Z.00000000059
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1041-2573

Abstract

Abstract : Equating epic events in Paradise Lost with the experimental philosophy of the Royal Society, a commonplace in modern scholarship, misses the central concern of Milton's poetry: making intelligible prelapsarian states of being. Eve's irreparable transgression acutely stages the epistemology underlying the epic, what I call an evental poetics. Singular, unrepeatable events emerge as conceptual and narrative units of certainty that precipitate understanding of prelapsarian being, while repeatable experiences merely provide probable knowledge about the world one occupies. By showing how experiment, a postlapsarian epistemology, cannot take one back to Eden, Milton dismantles the redemptive promise of contemporary natural philosophy. Marking the disjunctions between poetic methods and natural philosophy, Miltonic events translate and make accessible to readers the unknowable prelapsarian world. Since what Paradise is remains inseparable from how one knows it, the epistemology of Paradise Lost reveals and theorizes the ontology of Miltonic poetics.