John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost has only been one attempt at justifying "the ways of God to men". Yet, his rendering of Adam and Eve's passage through a labyrinthine Garden of Eden with an enigmatically laughing God in the background has challenged writers ever since. This image of the garden as a playground of power structures has then gained ground in colonial and postcolonial texts where metaphors of cultivation or weeding acquired a disturbing life of their own. In this seminar we shall trace the main topics of Milton's epic in two postcolonial visions of paradise. We will focus on issues such as ethics, language, gender, race and nation.

Texts:

John Milton, Paradise Lost [books 1-4;9] Jem Poster, Rifling Paradise Romesh Gunesekera, Heaven's Edge