SoSe 20: S-Lit. Stud.: Periods-Genres-Concepts: Rewriting Milton
Justus Conrad Gronau
Kommentar
At the beginning of this seminar, we will consider John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667), commonly regarded by scholars as the greatest epic in the English language ever written. As one critic aptly observes, it "remains as the only serious British contender for equal ranking with the epics of Virgil and Homer" (Bradford). The unrhymed long poem (over 10000 lines of poetry) retells the grand narrative "Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit / Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste / Brought death into the world, and all our woe, / With loss of Eden" – Paradise Lost has set itself no lesser task than to rewrite Genesis and to "justify the ways of God to men". In combination with a close reading of the poem concerning key themes such as freedom, authority, and power in the first part of the seminar, we will take into account the historical contexts of Milton's lifetime. John Milton lived in a period of enormous religious and political turmoil (English Civil War, the regicide of King Charles I, the Restoration). As an English Puritan challenging Roman Catholicism and the legitimacy of the Anglican Church, and as someone who favoured the execution of Charles I, Milton was a "vigorous proponent of everything that, after 1660, was regarded by many in England as criminal and seditious" (Teskey). Peter Ackroyd's novel Milton in America (1996), therefore, imagines Milton to flee from England in order to escape his possible persecution after the Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II (as a defender of the regicide, Milton had, indeed, been imprisoned for a short while). In the second part of the semester, we will thus analyse Ackroyd's rewriting of Milton's life. In this historiographical metafictional novel, Ackroyd intertextually embeds the religious and political subtexts of Milton's time into a story in which the fictionalised character Milton founds a new strictly Puritan colony in New England.
Students need to acquire (and read): (1) a critical edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost (suggested edition: Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005; ISBN: 0393924289); (2) Ackroyd, Peter. Milton in America. London: Vintage, 1997. ISBN: 0749386258. Schließen13 Termine
Regelmäßige Termine der Lehrveranstaltung