Eureka!
Summer 2001 Workshop
Teaching Milton
Leader: Dr. Alison Chapman
Date: Monday, June 18, 2001
Goals
My goal is to give participants a deeper and fuller understanding of
John Milton and specifically of the sections of Paradise Lost contained
in the Holt, Rinehart, and Winston anthology. My hope is that a more
finely tuned and nuanced appreciation of Paradise Lost will inform and
energize the participants' own handling of this material in the high
school classroom. We will first engage closely with the text itself
and then follow up with a brainstorming session on ideas for teaching
Milton effectively and imaginatively.
Content
We will open with some discussion of the historical context of Milton's
epic and then turn quickly to Paradise Lost itself. Either all together
or in small groups, we will spend at least two hours doing an in-depth
close reading of just the first 26 lines: these lines encapsulate most
of the issues dealt with in the epic, and delving into Milton's opening
verse paragraph is a wonderful introduction both to his work and to his
poetic practice. This close reading will include discussion of Milton's
word choice (with reference to the Oxford English Dictionary), his classical
and Biblical allusions (with references to both the Bible and the
encyclopedia), and his use of varying poetic meters in order to create
meaning.
Once the opening is comfortably under our belt, we will turn to the
anthologized excerpt from Book 9 on the temptation of Eve. I will
present selected handouts to help provide a context for this selection.
For example, God's speech in Book 3 provides a telling contrast to Satan's
tortured meter and word choice; reading Saint Augustine's definition of evil
helps us understand iconographic context that Milton was working out of
(and against). We will conclude the workshop by talking about different
strategies for teaching Milton. I will describe some methods that have
worked well in the university classroom, and we can collectively discuss
how these might be adapted for high school students.
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