Class Recap 10/19

This is a cake I made for Milton's quatercentenary, in December 2009.

 

We began Wednesday's class with Jennifer's presentation on gender in Paradise Lost. Jennifer analyzed several important passages in the poem that outline a hiearchy of gender. We followed the presentation with a more general discussion of Milton's representation of gender, including a consideration of Adam and Eve's conversations with each other in Books 9-10.

Next, the class discussed John Rogers' "Political Science of Paradise Lost" (assigned for last week), comparing it with the earlier reading from J. Martin Evans. The latter placed PL within the discourse of colonialism; the former, within a scientific discourse. This conversation extended to a more general one about Milton and science. Finally, we looked at the piece by Jameela Lares on the homiletics of Books 11-12, emphasizing the important role of sermon theory, and academic preparation generally, for even nonconformist preachers of the seventeenth century. (Along the way we also had a very interesting side conversation about the literary merits of Books 11-12, and talked about other ways Milton could have ended his epic.)

From there we moved on to consider John Winthrop's sermon A Model of Christian Charity, noting that its emphasis on economic relations had very practical implications for colonists bound for the New World.

After the break, I showed the class a photo of the Sexual Harassment Cake, found on the blog Cake Wrecks. (I highly recommend this hilarious blog, by the way.) I compared Paradise Lost with this cake, noting (with reference to Lares' comments about disobedience and corrective sermons) the difficulty of  forbidding something verbally while simultaneously presenting that very thing to the visual imagination as an example.

At the end of class we read PL 12.624-49 (the ending), considering the imagery of mists and comets as a lingering Satanic presence. I suggested that the poem's closing images, while partly ones of loss, also represent the beginning of human history.