Ayelet C. Langer
Senior Lecturer, English Department, University of Haifa
Visiting Fellow, The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Studies, University of London
Publications
Samson's Lockean Person: Prefigurations of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in Milton's Samson Agonistes.
Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 21.3 (2021):1-19
This essay proposes that in Samson Agonistes (1671) Milton represents Samson’s development of self as a psychological process that is conditioned on Samson’s capacity to change his initial Hobbesian idea of self as a spatial construct to an understanding of himself as self-constituted by acts of consciousness. Samson’s process of self-constitution is, it is suggested, very similar to Locke’s theory of personal identity, published twenty-three years later in the second edition of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1694). Further, the connection Milton makes between personhood and freedom is strikingly similar to Locke’s understanding of the way in which these terms are linked. For Milton, as for Locke, only persons can become full-fledged agents. In Samson Agonistes, Milton offers the reader an opportunity to experience the process by which Samson develops into person, his choice not to respond to divine call, and, consequently, his failure to become a free agent. In Milton’s representation, Samson’s failure to achieve free agency results in a violent act that destroys both the Philistines and himself.
Identity over Time in Paradise Lost
University of Toronto Quarterly, 90.1 (2021): 42-57.
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Milton’s Aristotelian Transformations in the Representation of Regenerative Change
Modern Philology, 118 No. 3 (2021): 390-408
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A Possible Source for John Milton’s Paradise Lost 12.270-79 in Job 42:5
Notes and Queries, 67 (3) (2020), 383–385
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Samson's Now and 'I': Their Development in Time
Early Modern Literary Studies, vol. 21 (2), 2020
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Meanwhile: Paradisian Infinity in Paradise Lost
Partial Answers,19 No. 1 (2021).
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Temporal Succession in Samson Agonistes
Philosophy and Literature, 44.2 (2020): 298-309.
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Milton's Aristotelian Now
Milton Studies, 57 (2016), 95-117
I propose that underlying the various temporal functions of the now in Paradise Lost is a concrete and intelligible structure, which is modelled on Aristotle’s concept of the now in Physics IV. Similar to its Aristotelian prototype, the Miltonic now serves as a medium of interaction between mind and world, in and through which the unfallen mind transforms kinetic into temporal order.
By analyzing the two distinct ways in which the now is used in the language of the unfallen and fallen mind I argue that sequentiality is indispensable for our understanding of morality in Milton’s poem and is the only medium in and through which the individual achieves a coherent sense of his or her self as a free moral agent, who is capable of regeneration.
Milton’s Aevum: The Time Structure of Prevenient Grace in Paradise Lost
Early Modern Literary Studies, 17, (2014)
https://extra.shu.ac.uk/emls/journal/index.php/emls/article/view/14#
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Pardon may be Found in Time Besought:' Two Time Structures of the Mind in Paradise Lost and McTaggart's Theory of Time
Milton Studies, 52 (2011), 169-183
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Milton’s Thomistic Error: On the usefulness of the distinction between mistake and error in Samson Agonistes (Co-author Giora Hon)
Speer, Andreas, and Mauriège, Maxime, eds. Irrtum – Error – Erreur (Miscellanea Mediaevalia Band 40). De Gruyter, 2018
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Ayelet C. Langer
University of Haifa, English Language and Literature, Faculty Member
I'm a senior lecturer at the Department of English at Haifa University. My research interests are Early Modern literature with an emphasis on John Milton's poetry and its intellectual sources and engagements. I have published essays on Milton's representation of time, change, and infinity in light of Aristotle's Physics, the distinction between the A- and B-series of time developed by the 20th century Cambridge philosopher John M. E. McTaggart, Aquinas's commentary on the Book of Job, and Locke's theory of personal identity. I'm now working on a book project, funded by the Israel Science Foundation, on Milton and Time.
https://haifa.academia.edu/AyeletLanger
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3566-3413
Get in Touch
Dr. Ayelet Langer
Department of English Language and Literature
University of Haifa
199 Aba Khoushy Ave
Mount Carmel, Haifa
Israel 3498838
