NO SIN BUT IRONY: KIERKEGAARD AND MILTON'S SATAN
This essay considers Paradise Lost as a parable about irony, and reads Milton's porm in the light of Kierkegaard's meditations on poetic irony. It suggests that Milton's Satan achieves his disturbing power because he has mastered the logic if the existental ironist: there is no defeat...
| Published in: | Literature and theology |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Oxford University Press
1997
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| In: |
Literature and theology
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Parallel Edition: | Non-electronic
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| Summary: | This essay considers Paradise Lost as a parable about irony, and reads Milton's porm in the light of Kierkegaard's meditations on poetic irony. It suggests that Milton's Satan achieves his disturbing power because he has mastered the logic if the existental ironist: there is no defeating the opponent who knows that he knows nothing. The second half of the essay, however, follows Kierkegaard in looking at ways of going beyond irony, and focuses on the image which Milton draws of God's laughter. As Kierkegaard attempts to move beyond the totalizing ambitions of socratic and hegelian dialetic, he comes up against the frontier beyond which lies what Kierkegaard calls the ‘absurd’ and which he equates, in the vastness of its incomprehensibility, with God. In God's laughter Milton poeticizes this beyond. God's laughter is altogether different from Satan's. It is not the demonic laughter of irony but the expression of the absurd—the absurd which deconstructs, or rather betrays the constructedness of all our categories, including those of the knowable and unknowable. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4623 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Literature and theology
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/litthe/11.1.1 |