As promised in my last post on Milton: the following is the handout that I give to my students for their Milton paper.

Milton Paper Prompt
Basic info:
Length: 5 pages, double spaced, 1 inch margins, 12-pt. Times New Roman Font.

Prompt:
You will write a paper that engages in close textual analysis of Milton’s text.  You have a variety of strategies available to you:

1.       Close-reading: in this response to the prompt you will develop an argument about the poem by focusing exclusively on the text.  Here are some possible responses:

• Pick a passage: choose about 40-50 lines that you’d like to study in depth. Make an argument about how this passage is doing something that helps to explain a theme or character.  Consider in your conclusion why that contributes to a reading of the poem or a consideration of poem’s worldview.
• Trace a character’s development: one really good place to go is to compare and contrast the Satan that we get in Book 1 with the Satan that we get in Book 4. How is he different? Why does this matter?
• Compare and contrast two (or more) characters: one really good place to go for this response is to consider how Eve alternates between being like Satan and being like the Son.  What does Milton gain by making her resemble these two extremes?
• Consider a theme: make an argument about one of the following themes. What philosophy do you see the poem espousing in regards to any of the following:
  

                    i.     Justice and mercy
                    ii.     Predestination and free will
                    iii.     Eve’s ability to withstand the fall
2.     Responding to a critic: in this response, you will pick one of the critical essays in the back of you Norton Critical Edition. Note that almost all of the essays are excerpted, so your reading load will not be overburdened.  Make an argument about Paradise Lost and situate it in response to another critic.  There are a number of ways to do this:

• Agree, offering new evidence: In this case, you will corroborate the critic’s argument, pointing to other places in the text that support your essay’s argument.  Consider how the new evidence you bring to the conversation might affect the implications of the basic argument.
• Disagree, offering counter evidence: In this case, you will argue against the critic whom you’ve chosen, clearly explaining why your reading is stronger. You will consider what your new reading brings to the table.
• Agree, making some important qualifications or distinctions: In this case, you will argue that you basically agree with the critic but that you would want to nuance or change certain elements of what the critic has argued. Again, you will consider the implications of your reading, considering how your argument affects an overall understanding of the poem or of Milton’s worldview as evidenced from the poem.

3.     Engaging with the poem through visual analysis: Attached to this prompt, you will find four images: 1) John Baptist Medina, illustration of book 9, Paradise Lost, 4th ed. London, 1688; 2) William Blake, The Temptation and Fall of Eve, illustration of book 9, Paradise Lost, 1808; 3)  Gustave Doré, “Back to the thicket slunk,” illustration of 9.784, Paradise Lost, London 1866; and 4) Gustave Doré, “Not only tears,” illustration of 9.1121, Paradise Lost, London, 1866.  You will consider that these illustrations are “non-verbal” interpretations of Milton’s poem, Paradise Lost.   Explain the interpretation that the artist is making, and evaluate it based on textual evidence that you find in Milton.  Here are some guiding questions as you prepare for this paper:

• Identify the characters, actions, and scenes: What lines of Milton’s text does the artist appear to be illustrating? Is the illustration accurate in relation to Milton’s text? Is it clearly dependent on some source other than Milton? In choosing these characters, this action, this scene, what is the illustrator suggesting about them? Does the illustration indicate their relative importance? Does the illustrator ignore certain episodes usually deemed crucial?
• Examine the methods of the illustrators: does the illustrator focus on one key, dramatic event or does he attempt to epitomize the narrative sense of the whole book? Does the illustrator have a command of scale? Is concern with landscape important in the illustration? Is it a central concern?
• Explain how the illustrations interpret the text:  Are symbolic meanings attached to the literal? How do you know—because the figures reference, perhaps, iconography that you recognize? Does the illustration suggest the character’s states of mind, interior experience as well as exterior? Can you state some kind of thesis concerning the illustration: what kind of messages or meanings in Paradise Lost is this illustrator emphasizing? What kind of comments on, or criticisms of, Paradise Lost is this illustrator making?

The last prompt is one that I have taken from Virginia’s Tufte’s essay, “Visualizing Paradise Lost: Classroom Use of Illustrations by Medina, Blake, and Doré,” in the first edition of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Milton's Paradise Lost. It has been wildly successful in generating interesting, thoughtful student presentations. In fact, its success led me to design the assignment for Visualizing Shakespeare.

The very first time I attempted teaching Paradise Lost was in one of the gateway courses that all English majors at UC Davis have to take. I foolishly decided to teach just Books 1 and 9 of the epic, because those seemed to me to be the most important. I realized that my choices had dramatically skewed my students' understanding of the poem: they were still completely seduced by Satan and his powerful rhetoric, and they felt that the poem was fundamentally a tragedy. They couldn't see the forest for the two big trees that I had put in front of them. Teachers of this poem have a responsibility to be able to zoom out to the larger scope of Milton's vision, and then zoom back in to close read passages. Balancing the two is tough, but it is possible!

I have adapted the following list from Robert Halli's suggestions in his essay "'Proportion Due Giv'n and Receiv'd': Tailoring Paradise Lost to the Survey Course" from the first edition of the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Milton's Paradise Lost.  It works beautifully in the classroom, both in a sophomore-level survey and in an advanced high school classroom.

Selected passages to excerpt

• Book 1.1-330 (Satan and the devils wake up in a lake of fire after losing the battle against God and his angels.  They discuss the “tyranny” of heaven)
• Book 2.299-485 and 629-1055 (Beëlzebub names the motivation and the strategy for their continuing war against God; Satan journeys out of hell)
• Book 3.1-302 (God and the Son discuss what is about to happen in paradise, and the Son offers himself as a sacrifice)
• Book 4.1-408 and 440-491 (Satan arrives in Paradise and sees Adam and Eve for the first time; Eve recounts her earliest memories to Adam)
• Book 9.192-794 (First half of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve)
• Book 9.795-1189 (Second half of the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve)
• Book 10.452-577 and 706-1104 (Satan arrives back in Hell to tell the demons of his triumph; Eve tries to comfort Adam in his despair, and they both repent)
• Book 12.466-649 (Adam responds to Michaël’s prophecy about the Son and then leaves Paradise with Eve)

At Halli's suggestion, I have structured the excerpts around the theme of justice and mercy, really only adding Eve's recollection of her creation in Book 4 (this topic is pertinent because it contributes to the discussion that develops in the class about whether Eve's creation sets her up for a fall, and whether that is "just" or not.)

Both at UC Davis and at the OHS, I have found that many students are so intrigued by the theme and the poem that they read beyond the minimum requirements. I think that these excerpts allow for students to "see the forest" without having to read more, but those who wish to wander further into that forest have lots of accessible entry points. (I sound so Spenserian all of a sudden! -- I promise I am not leading you into Error's Den.)

In addition, I have several pieces of canonical Milton criticism that I assign for the students' homework presentation assignment.  All of these are excerpted in Gordon Teskey's Norton Critical Edition of the poem, but I would recommend that you provide students with scans of fuller passages than what Teskey excerpts in his edition. Unlike most Norton Critical Editions, this book divides the same essay up into multiple parts and puts the different parts into sections related to either characters ("On Satan," "On God," "On Adam and Eve," etc.) or topics ("On Style," "On Feminism," etc.). The result is that the argument in a single book is disrupted and, therefore, hard to follow.  Teskey's selection of texts is excellent but his choice of presentation is poor.

Here are the passages that I recommend:

• C.S. Lewis, "Satan," "The Fall," and "Conclusion" from A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 94-103, and 125-137.
• Northrop Frye, selections from "The Garden Within" and "Children of God and Nature" in The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton's Epics (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965): 60-72, 98-103.
• Stanley Fish, "Not so much a Teaching as an Intangling" and selections from "The Milk of the Pure Word" in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2nd. ed. (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998): 1-12, 80-92. 
• Barbara Lewalski, selections from "'Higher Arguments': Completing and Publishing Paradise Lost" in The Life of John Milton: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000): 479-88.

These critical passages certainly help to pique student interest. Part of the reason my students pushed beyond the minimum reading requirement is because they were encountering interesting passages in the critical reading, and they wanted to experience the poem own their own.

Coming up next: a writing assignment I use for Paradise Lost.