• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.64 no.1
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• pp.135-150
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• 2018

Focusing on the hermeneutic instability of a key word of Paradise Lost, "wander," this study attempts to situate John Milton's early modern epic in the longue $dur{\acute{e}}e$ historical transition from seignorial to capitalist mode of production, especially the displacement and reorganization of producer population, a corollary of early phase of modernization. The historic experience of vagrancy and its normalization, and the concomitant shift of the primary human sociability from given to voluntary bonds, I suggest, shape and inform Milton's early modern rewriting of the Biblical story of the fall and his revising of the heroic epic romance into a plebeian romance of a wandering, companionate couple. While building on the critical consensus on this poem's deliberate distancing from the tradition of classical epic and chivalric romance, this essay argues that Milton re-appropriates and re-channels the aspirational aspect of chivalric wandering, or mobility, for his plebeian heroes, a companionate conjugal couple. The hermeneutic instability of the word wander, this essay suggests, captures the duality of the historic experience of vagrancy, both the tragic experience of displacement and the liberational and uplifting dimension of that experience.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.7
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• pp.89-123
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• 2009

The Philippines was colonized by Spain for about centuries, from 1521 to 1898, and ruled by America for around four decades, from 1899 to 1946. After recovering from the Second World War, the government started to harness human labor as export itself. In the present time the overseas Filipinos keep the economy afloat with their steady transfer of money to relatives and dependents. Through the art works, the issue which Filipinos were exploited and exported by its government has been reflected as the various allegories. As Filipinos traditionally follow and keep Catholic belief, themes of Christ's sacrifice has allegorically been represented as salvation, struggle, suppression, and emancipation of people. Through the allegory, we can interpret both the intrinsic and superficial texts. Also we can identity certain modes of the visuality of allegory in selected works from Philippine art history that in their complex mediations materialize the people and dignity of their predicament and their prevailing. Philippine art can be divided as three different features: passion, vagrancy, and mass formation. The passion stage was depicted as deep structure of Christian thought and devotional feeling, harsh capitalist system. In the pictures of vagrancy, under the regime of Ferdinand Marcos, the themes of drift, deprivation, and homelessness are reckoned through the images of pictures. The stories represented with allegory have been played an important role to bring local issues up as national ones. Those stages take us to the processes of mass formation or the depiction of the people as a moment in the totality of force. The allegorical sign refers to another sign that precedes it, but with which it will never able to coincide reach back to a previous stage and in this constant attempt at return incorporates a structural distance from its origin. The true people's art is one that radically generates transformative technologies and techniques so that it irrevocably breaks the plane of "art". In the painting, the truth is represented by functioning as foundation of a rhetoric of the image. And at this axis, the passional, the vagrant, and the mass formation tend to come together because they render the form of contingency that must be suffered and hopefully surpassed, a Filipino subjectivity that must be stitched in time.