Cultural Engineering of the Poetic Parental Instinct :: Areopagitica John Milton Poetry Essays

Cultural Engineering of the Poetic Parental consciousness It seems that biological genetic engineering is not a contained threat in the last decade it seems to choose spilled significantly into cultural and literary studies. In conversion studies, this trend becomes evident in Richard A. Goldthwaithes Wealth and the Demand for artifice in Italy 1300-1600 (1993) and especially in Lisa Jardines Worldly Goods A New memoir of the Renaissance (1996). These new histories of worldly and wealthy Renaissance attempt to be consumerism and Thatcherism as the moving spirit of Renaissance society and art. Considering the mere incident that less than 5% of the population could have afforded art, this search for Thatcherite motions in Renaissance society and culture seems to correlate, in its result, to what T. S. Eliot defines as artists search for new emotions in art. Unfortunately, this trend of engineering the cultural history can be observed, albeit in a slightly different form, also in the studies of individual authors and their works, and toilette Milton and his Areopagitica are no exception. One of the reasons for this trend in Milton studies and this particular nerve pathway can be sought in the over-saturation of Areopagitica criticism dealing, to a spectacular extent, with various aspects of authorial intention and textual authority. This particular strain seems to have been brought to the point of absurdity in Paul M. Dowlings Polite Wisdom ethnical Rhetoric in Miltons Areopagitica (1995), a book from which one can conclude, in contrast to earlier criticism (Barker, Kendrick, Belsey), that Miltons main intention for his pamphlet was to be understood at two levelsas suggested in Dowlings title and to confirm simply the freedom of philosophic speech. As D. F. McKenzie has noted, recently there has been a shift of scholarly interest in Miltons Areopagitica from questions of authorial intention and textual authority to those of textual dissemination and re adership (Miller 26). While this distancing from the authorial intention has resulted in some illuminating works about the world of printing, Renaissance economy, censoring and public sphere (Miller, Sherman, Norbrook), it has also produced some curious side-effects because the critics cannot avoid, in their last-place analysis, touching upon the authorial intention in the light of their newly make discoveries. Thus, Stephen B. Dobranski suggests that, since Areopagitica is about books, the reading of the text should begin (but not, of course, end) by placing the pamphlet in spite of appearance the world of printing