Wednesdays 1-3 PM
January 14 through March 3, 2004
Kendal - Card Room
Frank Kermode, one of the great English literary critics and a Milton scholar, said of Paradise Lost: “The time cannot be far off when Paradise Lost will be read once more as the most perfect achievement of English poetry, perhaps the richest and most intricately beautiful poem in the world.” Milton converted the brevity and economy of Genesis 1, 2, and 3 into an epic poem of roughly 12,000 lines. It covers nothing less than the beginning and the end of all things in the Judeo-Hellenic-Christian tradition. In that vast sweep, it addresses how we are to live our lives on every level: personal, political, moral/ethical, religious. It leaves nothing out. The universal is grounded in the particular in the beautifully drawn characters of Adam and Eve, for Paradise Lost is also a very real love story about an idealized husband and wife who, although they dwell in Paradise, must still resolve domestic tensions. Milton had a profound understanding of human psychology.
In this course, we will do a close reading of Paradise Lost. The format will be both lecture and discussion.
Class is limited to 20 participants
Miriam Richards has a Masters Degree in Linguistics from UCLA and did her doctoral work in Linguistics at Columbia University. In 1965 she spent a year in Istanbul, Turkey on a Fulbright Scholarship. She has been on the faculty in the Linguistics Program and the English Department at Dartmouth College since 1989 and has been teaching literature, composition, and Paradise Lost for the last 14 years.
