Milton and the Problem of Belief

This chapter explores the tension in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and Samson Agonistes between the work of poetry and the work of faith. In Paradise Losts Milton conceives of faith on the analogy of poetry, insofar as both require a work of interpretation and construction, one aligned with the theological and legal notion of equity. But Milton’s 1671 volume, including Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes, is the poet’s most powerful meditation on the dilemmas of faith. These poems question the notion of sacred truth precisely because they privilege the activity of interpreting the biblical text over the text itself. One implication of this argument is that God himself might be an artifact or construct of the human imagination.

Hobbes and Maker’s Knowledge

This chapter argues that in Leviathan Hobbes draws on the classical rhetorical tradition to make his case for maker’s knowledge, or the idea that we can only know what we make ourselves. In particular, it explores the role of fiction, narrative, and persuasion in the argument of the text. I demonstrate that one of Hobbes’s goals is to disarm the revolutionary potential of religious belief by arguing that such belief is an artifact created by the sovereign. Hobbes’s emphasis on maker’s knowledge or construction anticipates the emergence of the discipline of aesthetics in the eighteenth century.

Literature and Literariness

This chapter argues that literariness in the Western tradition has been defined by a tension between making and believing, between an emphasis on poiesis as construction and the various attitudes of belief the reader or audience brings to a text or performance. It traces this tension from the work of Plato and Aristotle to the early modern period, when the centrality of rhetoric and maker’s knowledge (the idea that we can only know what we make ourselves) fundamentally shaped the conception of the literary work. It argues that modern concepts of literariness represent a declension from the heroic conception of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.

Modern Literariness

This chapter explores the meaning of literariness in the aftermath of Kantian aesthetics. It focuses on the work of Søren Kierkegaard and J. M. Coetzee. It argues that, despite the strong formal differences between the texts of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Coetzee, all are engaged in a conversation about the kinds of belief we address to things that we make, and all three contribute to the construction of a specifically modern, formalist idea of literariness. This modern idea of literariness represents a declension from the heroic idea of poetic making characteristic of the early modern period.