LIBRARY NOTES
In the first evening on Friday, October 30, 1998, John Milton and his time will be introduced briefly through his poetry and notable prose. Milton participates in and challenges the epic tradition in rewriting the Bible to "justify the ways of God to man." How does his narrator articulate options and dilemmas of a sacred - and blind- poet? We will introduce God and Satan and investigate why Milton first began with Satan, saving God for Book III. We'll look at Adam and Eve. Why is Adam more upright and Eve set up for a narcissistic fall? Finally, we'll explore some of the major characteristics and dilemmas of Milton's morality as charted in part though portrayals of Hell and through Satanic logic of "freedom," paradise, perfect couples and overgrown gardens, including the rules of the first dinner party in which Adam and Eve host the angel Raphael.
The second program on Friday, November 6, 1998 will center on how Milton builds up to the Fall, the "fortunate" aspect of the Fall, the insistence on free will and the aftermath. Here we have a new series of "firsts": first indigestion, first sinful yet seemingly exciting sex, first blame and first apologies. Throughout this epic, Milton gets to reimagine the meaning of "firstness" - even from the very line: "Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe."
Dr. Abbe Blum is an associate professor of English literature at Swarthmore College, where she teaches courses in Shakespeare, Milton, Renaissance literature and contemporary women writers. Her book, Ordinary and Extraordinary Agency: Milton, the Powell Women, and Critical Investments will be published by Stanford University Press this year. She will devote two evenings to discussion of John Milton and his great epic,
Paradise Lost. Passages from the poem will be dramatized by actors.
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