Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.
Chargement... John Milton: A Hero of Our Timepar David Hawkes
Aucun Chargement...
Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. I had some trouble swallowing the implausible argument, which goes something like this: Milton justifies terroristic violence only as directed against idolatry (i.e. mistaking signs for things of substance). Today's dominant form of idolatry is the fetishization of the commodity. Therefore Milton is a radical anticapitalist prophet for our time. Except Milton was also a professional usurer, and republican Protestant iconoclast who identified idolatry with Catholicism and monarchism. So I am not sure that it adds up. ( ) This biography, written for the 400th anniversary of Milton’s birth, is a rather mediocre offering, and hardly worth being associated with the great poet’s name. Hawkes argues, rightly I think, that Milton’s perennial encounters with religious strife and political contretemps should have us embracing him as a contemporary, not as an austere figure of worldly timelessness. Milton was a world-class heterodox: he ceaselessly questioned the authority of institutions (including the English monarchy), wrote jeremiads against human obsequiousness and psychological idolatry, and led a far-from-ordinary family life. Hawkes’ continued interest in Milton’s life derives from his interest in iconoclasm in all forms, and Milton’s active embrace of it. One of the few strong points of this book is the author’s willingness to look at the important texts other than just “Paradise Lost.” The pamphleteering, including the “Areopagitica,” is paid due consideration, and Milton’s advocacy of divorce and unfettered freedom of speech strike us as ultra-modern even four centuries later. Unfortunately, Hawkes seems to be too invested in ideological concerns that I imagine would barely have consumed any of Milton’s attention. He inevitably wants to connect everything to usury (that is, the practice of loaning out money for a profit, which was a relatively new practice in Milton’s time). Milton’s father was a usurer, and this fact is somehow used to interpret, in a bizarre, anachronistic mixture of Freudianism and Marxism, many of Milton’s motivations. While Milton might have had many opinions that put him out of the mainstream, he is very much a member of the seventeenth century when it comes to his opinion on this: usury means making an idol out of money, when the only thing we should make an idol out of is God himself. Hawkes also makes reference to Nietzsche at least twice in the book, one time saying that he “fatuously preferred evil” (p. 185). I found this ignorance to be surprising from someone who apparently works at an American university. Nietzsche already suffers from enough willful misinterpretation at the hands of people who know plenty about him than to incur this. And if he’s saying this stuff about Nietzsche, what is he getting wrong about Milton, a figure with whom I’m even less familiar? Milton is the indispensable poet, both for his time and for ours. This biography, however, can easily be skipped – and should be. It’s amazing how this was, according to the cover, made the “Booklist Top Ten Biography Pick.” While I have yet to read either of these, I do have two more Milton biographies – Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns’ “John Milton: Life, Work, and Thought,” and Anna Beer’s “”Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot.” A quick perusal shows both of them to be far superior to Hawkes’ book, and I look forward to reading them in the future. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
Distinctions
John Milton--poet, polemicist, public servant, and author of one of the greatest masterpieces in English literature, Paradise Lost--is revered today as a great writer and a proponent of free speech. In his time, however, his ideas far exceeded the orthodoxy of English life; spurred by his conscience and an iron grip on logic, Milton was uncompromising in his beliefs at a time of great religious and political flux in England. In John Milton, David Hawkes expertly interweaves details from Milton's public and private life, providing new insight into the man and his prophetic stance on politics and the social order. By including a broad range of Milton's iconoclastic views on issues as diverse as politics, economics, and sex, Hawkes suggests that Milton's approach to market capitalism, political violence, and religious terrorism continues to be applicable even in the twenty-first century. This insightful biography closely examines Milton's participation in the English civil war and his startlingly modern ideas about capitalism, love, and marriage, reminding us that human liberty and autonomy should never be taken for granted. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
Discussion en coursAucunCouvertures populaires
Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)821.4Literature English & Old English literatures English poetry 1625-1702, Caroline and Restoration periodsClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
Est-ce vous ?Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing. |