How Milton Works [Paperback]

Stanley Fish (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2003 | ISBN-10: 067401233X | ISBN-13: 978-0674012332

Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin, first published in 1967, set a new standard for Milton criticism and established its author as one of the world's preeminent Milton scholars. The lifelong engagement begun in that work culminates in this book, the magnum opus of a formidable critic and the definitive statement on Milton for our time.

How Milton works "from the inside out" is the foremost concern of Fish's book, which explores the radical effect of Milton's theological convictions on his poetry and prose. For Milton the value of a poem or of any other production derives from the inner worth of its author and not from any external measure of excellence or heroism. Milton's aesthetic, says Fish, is an "aesthetic of testimony": every action, whether verbal or physical, is or should be the action of holding fast to a single saving commitment against the allure of plot, narrative, representation, signs, drama--anything that might be construed as an illegitimate supplement to divine truth. Much of the energy of Milton's writing, according to Fish, comes from the effort to maintain his faith against these temptations, temptations which in any other aesthetic would be seen as the very essence of poetic value.

Encountering the great poet on his own terms, engaging his equally distinguished admirers and detractors, this book moves a 300-year debate about the significance of Milton's verse to a new level.

(20010415)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

erhaps more prominent in recent years as a controversial legal theorist (The Trouble with Principle), soldier in the culture wars (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too) and the highest-profile defector from Duke's star-packed '80s English department (he is now a dean at the University of Illinois at Chicago), Fish forcefully reminds us that it is as a reader of John Milton that he first made his mark, with 1967's Surprised by Sin. That book not only revolutionized Milton criticism, but pioneered the notion of "reader response" as a critical tool. Three and a half decades later, in more than 500 pages of virtuosic close reading, Fish gives us a premodern Milton, in which every element vocabulary, syntax, line breaks is directed "from the inside out" toward divine truth. Beginning with the questions "What is Milton about?" "What is Milton's account of knowing and perception?" and "How is Milton to be read?" Fish rarely looks up from Milton's texts, but the details of his readings convey at all times the sweep of the poet's thought, the power of what Fish might call his "containment" of disparate impulses, the grandeur of his religious quest. Milton scholars will definitely have their summer reading cut out for them, but any reader interested in tracking an encounter across time of one bottomlessly inquisitive, endlessly skeptical 17th-century mind with a similarly oriented, 21st-century critic idiosyncratically charged with belief would be advised to stash this volume in their beach bag. (June 25) Forecast: Fish was recently profiled in the New Yorker, with How Milton Works receiving two quick mentions. Every academic collection will want the book, and Fish's extra-academic reputation should draw the canonically minded curious, though few will have previously encountered Surprised by Sin.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The shadow of Fish's barbed reputation is far longer than that of the man or his work itself: he is better known now for the scandal surrounding Alan Sokal's hoaxing contribution to Fish's journal, Social Text, and Fish's own feeble response to it, than his once-revolutionary reader-response criticism. In the wake of the Sokal disaster, Fish has left the demoralized English department of Duke University for the University of Illinois, Chicago, whence comes this long study of Milton's theology and method a study Fish claims to have been writing since 1973. What students of Milton and readers of literary criticism will find refreshing is the low volume of jargon and poststructuralist lit-speak in this solidly argued work. Some may quarrel with his conclusions, but his erudition is indisputable. This work, which addresses the whole range of Milton's oeuvre in prose and poetry, asserts that the core of Milton's message is that "there is only one choice to be or not to be allied with divinity" and that the Fall that separated Satan from Heaven and Adam and Eve from Eden, is, paradoxically, the only source of action, politics, individuality, and poetry, including Milton's own. It is easy enough to quarrel with Fish's reading of certain lines or passages, but he has caught something about Milton's strange talent, its immobility and monumentality. What's more, Fish has done so with an intensity of close reading that would have been the envy not so much of today's poststructuralists despite Fish's self-avowed radicalism as of yesteryear's "close reading" critics, like Cleanth Brooks. Despite the professional faltering and failures that have preceded it, Fish's title is an eminently readable, provocative, and indispensable new study of one of our greatest poets. For most collections, especially academic libraries. Graham Christian, formerly with Andover-Harvard Theological Lib., Cambridge, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (October 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067401233X
• ISBN-13: 978-0674012332
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,349,679 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University. He has previously taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. He has received many honors and awards, including being named the Chicagoan of the Year for Culture. He is the author of twelve books and is now a weekly columnist for the New York Times. He resides in Andes, New York; New York City; and Delray Beach, Florida; with his wife, Jane Tompkins.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A much-needed splash of cold acid, July 18, 2001

By 

Brian D'Amato "-- author of "In the Court... (Midwest) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: How Milton Works (Hardcover)

Stanley Fish takes an extremely hard line in this at-least-twenty-years-in-the-making study. Besides the terrific close readings, what's most amazing here is Fish's suggestion that Milton (as either the most or at least the second-most important writer in the English language) might actually have known what he was doing. The fact that this is today a radical stance is a comment on the bizarre orthodoxy of current critical thinking. One of the most hillarious set pieces of this book is a too-true list of "What Liberals Believe," after which Fish points out that Milton believes exactly none of these things. By the end of the book I was ready -- despite being a committed atheist -- to join the Creator's angelic hordes in a rousing chorus of "Amen!"

4.0 out of 5 stars adding a new twist, August 30, 2011

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Milton Works (Paperback)

Divine doctrine can teach a group of people they belong together, but when nationalities attempt to use an official national religion to inspire loyalty, people with a genuine attachment to religion are apt to fall for hidden beliefs and coded politics as William Shakespeare's The Tempest found itself in a political climate in which "a dramatist who wrote the way Shakespeare did was likely to get beaten up" (Clare Asquith, Shadowplay, p. 264). Stanley Fish manages to make liberals the opposite of the holy doctrines of Milton for being free in their own way:

so that it makes perfect sense

to say, as Satan does,

I know what the good is -

I just choose another path (p. 55)

Liberals believe that communication

and persuasion take place

(or should take place)

in the context of that rationality

and that it is possible to bring anyone -

except perhaps, the mentally impaired -

to a clear understanding, so long as he

or she is willing to set aside or bracket

all biases and preconceptions. (pp. 56-57).

Milton believes none of these things.

He believes that all the evidence is in

and that it points to a single conclusion -

we must discern the will of God and do it -

that should form the basis of our thought

and action in any and all situations. (p. 57).

I have tried to take a liberal view to rock and roll as a reality-based culture in the midst of commercial exploitation, but religion might have played some part of Mark David Chapman singing "Imagine John Lennon is dead" during a prayer group meeting of the Chapel Woods Presbyterian Church in Decatur, Georgia. John Lennon was not entirely unwelcome in New York City: he was merely shot down in the street. What makes modern regimentation of the American totalitarian nobodies coincide with the ideas of Stanley Fish in How Milton Works in seeing love of self in the temptations rejected by Christ:

after seeing Christ reject

wealth, honor, arms,

art, kingdom, empire, glory,

fame, the active life,

and the life of contemplation (p. 307)

The CIA prevented Americans from gaining personal recognition of Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko in February, 1964, by locking him up to dry him out and treat him like the target of a counterintelligence operation because a previous Soviet defector, Anatoli Mikhailovich Golitsyn, had said that anybody who comes after me is a fake. Trying to make everything that happens a big secret while Golitsyn maintains his special adviser status to explain to the CIA whatever the KGB was up to. Fish has a big analysis of some lines:

But wisest Fate says no,

This must not yet be so (p. 318)

"Not yet" is what the poem

has been saying all along,

and here it says it openly,

leaving everyone -

poet, readers, characters -

in the position in which

they have been so often placed

by the verse, waiting for

something to happen. (p. 318).

Satan has so much in common with counterintelligence operations:

The first epithet the Son applies

to Satan suggests that the fiend's

substance is largely verbal:

"composed of lies" (p. 339).

Lying, the Son continues, is

"thy sustenance, thy food"

a food Satan offers to "the Nations"

in the form of verbal "Delusions" (p. 339).

15 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Milton sans jargon, July 9, 2001

By 

P. Nagy "revreader" (Chapel Hill, NC USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How Milton Works (Hardcover)

The outline of Fish's acerbic standing often eclipses his critical innovations (nearly 35 years ago now) in the invention of reader-response theory in his reputation setting initial study of Milton in Surprised by Sin. Now he returns to study of Milton in this magisterial book. Fish is popularly known for inadvertently setting off the most embarrassing scandal in the science wars when Alan Sokal's hoaxing contribution to Fish's journal, Social Text was denounced by Sokal as a paradoy of postmodernist cant. Fish's own pathetic comeback dampened the brief hegemony of postmodernist political trends. Fish is also a controversial legal theorist (The Trouble with Principle) and a glib combatant in the culture wars (There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too), but it is as a reader of John Milton that he first made his most enduring mark, with 1967's Surprised by Sin.In the wake of the Sokal disaster, Fish has left the demoralized English department of Duke University for the University of Illinois, Chicago where he has returned his attentions to his once-revolutionary reader-response criticism in this surprisingly jargon free study, How Milton Works. This book concentrates on the whole range of Milton's oeuvre in prose and poetry. Fish asserts that the core of Milton's significance is richly theologically, in that "there is only one choice to be or not to be allied with divinity." In various chapters Fish reworks the rich mythic structure of Paradise Lost to show how the Fall that separated Satan from Heaven parallels Adam and Eve loss Eden. So the meaning of human existence is the attempt to find restoration in the Divine image. This is perhaps ironically the single foundation of meaningful action, politics, individuality, and poetry, including Milton's own. It is obvious that not all readers of Milton will so easily agree with Fish's premises or conclusions but it is likely to quicken Milton study as his earlier study did. Also his painstaking close readings and carefully wrought arguments, enough so that perhaps many will be encouraged to return and read anew this most British of our poets. The rich architecture of Milton's epics, it abstract phrasing and taut moral reach and ambivalence that is at once immobile in its traditionalism and radical in it modernism makes Fish's readings and argument another milestone in Milton studies.