SPRING 2000
This information effective for Spring 2000.
Check with instructor the first day of class for any changes.
Professor Jody Greene
This course will offer students the opportunity to read the major works of both poetry and prose by John Milton (1608-1674). In order to facilitate reading Milton's works, students will be given an extensive introduction to the history, politics, and culture of seventeenth-century England, and especially to the period of the Civil Wars (1640-1660), in which Milton was an active participant. Students will get to know the Milton of Lycidas and Paradise Lost, certainly, and will spend plenty of time exploring why it is that Milton is considered one of the two or three most important poets in English literary history, and Paradise Lost a kind of national epic. Yet students will also get to know other Miltons: the Milton of Eikonoklastes, who with considerable savagery&emdash;and ultimate success&emdash;advocated the beheading of his own King, Charles I; the Milton of the Divorce Tracts, who was dubbed a "libertine" by contemporaries for his frank acknowledgment that marriage, more often than not, made his countrymen miserable people and unproductive citizens; and the Milton of Areopagitica, whose defense of the liberty of the press remains one of the most passionate and well-known documents in the long history of the movement for freedom of expression and freedom from censorship.
In addition to offering an overview of Milton's works, read in the context of seventeenth-century English culture and politics, this course will introduce students to the range of methods for reading and interpreting Milton that have emerged over the past 350 years. In particular, students will have the opportunity to test a diverse array of recent critical methodologies&emdash;feminist, new historicist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive&emdash;to see how well they stand up to the challenge of helping us to understand and interpret Milton's works. Students will have the opportunity to read secondary works on Milton&emdash;or excerpts from those secondary works&emdash;but in general this reading will be optional.
No previous knowledge of early modern English history, poetics, or literature will be assumed.
Requirements for the class include:
Required text: Complete Poems and Major Prose of John Milton, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Available at the Bay Tree Bookstore. Some used copies should be available.