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Viewing report
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"Downcast Eyes" on a Downward Path to Wisdom. Edition No. 1
VDM Publishing House, Dec 2010, Pages: 168
In this study, the visual metaphors of John Milton's Paradise Lost are analyzed and read through the poststructuralist perspective of Jacques Derrida on the issue of vision/blindness. To establish the contextualization for the dialogue on this issue, Martin Jay's book Downcast Eyes serves as a far- reaching guide from the early allusions on sight up to a poststructuralist/postmodern view. A careful reading of the visual metaphors of Paradise Lost will prove that, in this epic poem of the seventeenth century, the dialectics of traditional philosophy on the issue of vision/blindness should be placed 'under erasure' with the cancellation of the literal eye and the insertion of the figural 'I'. To attain such operation, I propose that the exercise of sight undergoes a process of interiorization that resembles the going inwardly through a 'downward path to wisdom'.I also propose that the abovementioned operation, the simultaneous cancellation of the eye and insertion of the 'I', is accomplished in the epic through a 'darkness visible' perspective in the establishment of an (in) stance in the matters of interpretation.
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