Epic gaze in Paradise Lost

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2021-2-01

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Demirel, Fatih

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This study aims to investigate the workings of gaze in John Milton’s Paradise Lost with regard to Helen Lovatt’s book on epic gaze and the theoretical insights of three important writers on gaze: Sartre, Foucault and Lacan. The study focusses on four main characters of the epic: Satan, God, Adam and Eve. Lovatt’s epic gaze proves to be an appropriate starting point for this study, while the other named theorists’ ideas are employed more or less for different characters and for different scenes. Sartre’s notion of the gaze concerns the ontological level rather than everyday experience and is used mostly for the analysis of the gazes of Satan, Adam and Eve. Foucault’s view of the gaze, however, concerns power relations and therefore offers most insights into God’s gaze in the poem. For the investigation of Satan and Eve’s gazes in different phases, in contrast, the analysis employs mostly Lacan’s ideas of the gaze, which are related to his developmental psychological model. All the findings show that Milton’s epic uses gaze in differing and distinctive ways, producing cinematographic scenes.

Subject Keywords

Paradise Lost, John Milton, Theories of the gaze, Epic gaze

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/89553

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

F. Demirel, “Epic gaze in Paradise Lost,” M.A. - Master of Arts, Middle East Technical University, 2021.