ENGLISH 447 (01): JOHN MILTON (MWF 9:30 –10:30 Spring 2016) Mark Heberle
(This course fulfills English major requirements for single-author OR pre-1700 courses, as well as 400-level courses)
Milton John Milton has been more controversial for a longer period of time than any canonical writer in English literature, rankling Catholics, Puritans, and Anglicans alike in his own century, Tories in the eighteenth (e.g., Samuel Johnson), anti-Semites (Ezra Pound), conservatives (T.S. Eliot), and feminists in ours. He has also been admired by writers as unlike as the Royalist John Dryden, the revolutionary William Blake, the feminist scholar and critic Catherine Belsey, the Christian C.S. Lewis, the Marxist Terry Eagleton, and all the great English Romantic poets, for whom his example of political courage and poetic sublimity was a model. Author of some of the classic passages of male chauvinism in world literature, he wrote Paradise Lost in an all-female household and gave Eve the last word in his great poem. A fierce opponent of all authoritarians, he created a God in Paradise Lost that many readers see as a tyrant and a Satan whom others have found more impressively anti-authoritarian than Milton himself. The last and perhaps most comprehensive of the great Renaissance writers of England, he drew upon the entire Western literary tradition in his work, yet had Jesus dismiss all secular literature as empty in his final epic, Paradise Regained. The Beethoven of literature, he wrote his greatest works when blind after narrowly escaping execution himself for supporting the execution of Charles I and the dismantling of the Church and Parliament of England. The “no-spin zone” of his work at its best would eloquently deride or condemn virtually everything that passes for serious public commentary in these impoverished days. We may not like everything we read, but none of us will be able to deny the brilliance of the mind that wrote it.
Milton’s world
This course will explore the Miltonic universe, which means the world of early modern middle-class and revolutionary England as well as the classical, Christian, and Renaissance inheritance of Western culture that Milton, as the first great dead white male liberal and the most important Puritan in British literature, transformed into his own self-expression. We will study Milton’s works in relation to his life—and his wives—as well as to the historical and ideological crises of the seventeenth century, following the tripartite sequence that history determined would be his extraordinary career: early quasi-Renaissance poetry, mature ideological treatises and sonnets, late epics and drama
Course Requirements:
1. Critical analysis of early poetry (4 –6 pages)
2. Paper on Paradise Lost that incorporates some secondary criticism (6 –8 pages)
3. Group oral and written reports on a prose work not read by other members of the class
4. Mid-term (closed book) and final exam (open book)
5. Attendance and participation in discussions
Book required:
John Milton, Major Works Oxford UP