The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0798  Friday, 14 April 2000.

From:           Sean Lawrence <
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Date:           Thursday, 13 Apr 2000 08:19:48 -0700
Subject: 11.0791 Re: Milton
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0791 Re: Milton

Gabriel Egan writes:

>Isn't the point of the genesis stories that these speech acts are
>special because their originate everything? Surely it's modern to think
>that language can now do these things.

Perhaps.  Though we could look to certain Italian humanists, who thought
of language as constituting a people; this isn't the sort of trivial
sense of changing a name and therefore a substance that we encounter in
the postmodern, but it's still a matter of clinging to words as if they
had magical power to grant substance.  Why else would the English gentry
have wasted their time getting titles, as if being called "sir" could
make one courteous and brave?

Cheers,
Se