CCS 110: Milton
Fall, 2011
Second Paper

For your second (and major) paper for the course, I’d like you to do an original critical essay on Paradise Lost, an essay that will demonstrate your comprehensive understanding of the poem. Because this is a CCS course, I’d like to leave the possibility open for you to develop your own topic. But I’ll also suggest some possible critical topics that I think could lead to fruitful engagement with the poem. It’s assumed that your topic will derive from our discussions this quarter, and you will want to show a familiarity with that discussion in your approach. The discourse of the class should be its starting point and its context. In practice, you should assume that your readership is the class itself, that you are addressing members of our seminar on the topic you’ve chosen.

While there is no set limit, an essay of around 2000 words is envisioned. Note that the essay is not a research paper, but an original critical essay based on your own engagement with Milton over the past several weeks. Having read Paradise Lost at least twice, you will want to show familiarity with the whole scope of the poem.

You may, if you wish, also contextualize your essay in some critical discussion of Milton; in this case you will append a bibliography of the scholarly and critical works you consult and annotate all specific debts. But because the essay is to be an original critical essay deriving from your own experience of the poem, do not substitute extensive reading in the criticism for your own response.

Here are some possible topics:

1. A poet’s medium, of course, is language, and in Paradise Lost Milton wants to suggest the relationship of language to his themes of unfallen innocence and the falls of Satan and of Adam and Eve. How does language itself appear to be an explicit and implicit theme of the poem? What attitudes do you see expressed toward language by the various characters and by the poet? What do you believe emerges as the poem's understanding of rhetorical and poetic language? What is human language in innocence, what is it after the fall? What appears to be suggested as the proper language (a proper poetics?) for fallen humanity?

2. Why does Milton intrude his own voice into the poem? Before Milton epic had been understood as a genre that was public and directed outward to history through an objective narrator. But Milton’s own subjectivity makes its way into the poem at significant moments, for example in the invocations. that begin Books 1, 3, and 7, and the references to the choice of subject matter at the beginning of the book that narrates the fall, Book 9. Why does he do this? Why does he intrude the poet into his epic narrative? Is there any logic or progression in these “intrusions”? Can you see a plausible strategy in the relation of the poet’s subjectivity to his larger thematic concerns in the poem?

3. In our discussions we have called Paradise Lost the last European epic and the first mock epic. How can it be both at the same time? What might this mean? A frequent way of referring to epic in the seventeenth century was as an “heroic poem.” Consider Milton’s practice of “heroic” poetry and his engagement with the classical traditions. (Obviously you’ll want to have some real familiarity with the ancient epics.) How does this relate to his discussions at various points in the poem to the thematics of heroism? How, finally, is Paradise Lost, an heroic poem? What does it project as heroism in the fallen world it addresses?

4. A crucial fact about John Milton the man is that he was blind — had been blind in fact for the decade previous to his completing serious work on Paradise Lost. This blindness had been interpreted by his political enemies as God’s judgment on his support of regicide and revolution. Surprisingly perhaps, in the poem Milton does not hide the fact of his blindness, but makes explicit reference to it at several points. How can the poem as a whole be understood as an argument vindicating the poet’s blindness? Is there any pattern or rationale to its tropes of light, darkness, sight, blindness, etc.?

5. We have noticed that Paradise Lost in its image of Adam and Eve in innocence in Book IV portrays the relationship between them as strictly hierarchical. This vision of innocent, “ideal” man and woman accords of course with the general seventeenth-century view of the relation between the sexes. But is there tension within the poem of this understanding with other ways of understanding the relationship between the sexes? Does the poem implicitly (or explicitly?) alter this view as it develops? Does it portray a rigidly patriarchical understanding of the sexes, or is the poem in some ways interestingly conflicted on gender relations? Are changes visible in its portrayal of post-fallen man and woman?

6. Seduction, alienation, and jealousy in Paradise Lost? This may sound lurid and strange, but does the poem suggest such a subplot, implicitly in its similes and epic comparisons and explicitly in its temptations and the relationship of Adam and Eve? How is the Edenic marriage challenged and perhaps broken? Is it reestablished? Is there hope for this couple? Is Paradise Lost an implicit novel as well as an epic poem?

Whether you choose one of the above or work up a topic of your own, I’d like you to put together a paragraph in the next week outlining your thinking about the approach you’ll take; you can send this by email if you like (to oconnell@english.ucsb.edu, not to the class website). And I would like to meet with each of you about your topic – either next week or the week after.

We’ll set a due date in the next week or so, but expect that it will occur in the last week of the quarter.