THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY
THE DARK SIDE OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: This is a revisionary reading of Paradise Lost bringing in arguments to support the hypothesis that the grand narratives of modernity - such as the logocentric structure of the universe, trust in reason, the civilising mission of Enlightenment culture, or the securely grounded hierarchies of belief - and the counter-narratives subverting them were twin-born. Deconstruction offers the framework against which Milton's epic is interrogated in an attempt to expose the evidentiary basis for this claim. Coming forth at the very outset of modernity, Milton's critique of royal absolutism extended into a critique of hegemonic thought and speech that sounded peculiar among the other voices of his age, freighted as they were with the universalist assumptions of the dawning Augustan Age. In the history of ideas, the "dark" side of modernity was mainly contributed by the British empiricist and historicist schools of thought promoting perspectivism, perceptualism, associanism, a sense of cultural scepticism, and historical relativism, which may have fed into a literary tradition, running from Milton to the culture of sensibility and versions of the Gothic in the later eighteenth century. It was Arch-Enemy Milton who set the stage for various forms of subsequent anti-hegemonic discourses through anti-teleology, decentred picture of the universe, deconstruction of unique origin and of absolute authority, rewriting wrong the sacred tradition, aporia, unstable identity and signification.

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