On the Creation of Modern Comparison

Except this is really my last one of my undergraduate career.
Still, it feels never-ending. Probably will be.

I'll be honest: there's very little of Milton that I felt any connection to. Scott wrote a post about T.S. Eliot and his thoughts on Milton, and I responded to it with the following: "Verbose inefficiency seems a good description for what I've been annoyed with."

There were only a few times that I found myself interested in Milton's work. Those times were his Divorce Tracts and Areopagitica. That's not to say that I didn't find class discussions and the primary texts interesting. I just mean to say that Milton didn't astound me with his poetry the way that Eliot does. I don't like very much poetry, so I will always be more fond of prose.

Final Milton Paper

First! Good luck with finals everyone!

The Dangers of Extreme Individualism in the Pursuit of Freedom

Social Interaction

First off, I don't know how my paper would have turned out if I hadn't done this process, but I know for sure that it wouldn't be as well-focused and well-informed. The sources I was able to attain from this process are more useful than the one's I had found on Milton. Now, the correspondence.

I got around to emailing two people, Dr. Vincent Blasi, a professor of Law at Columbia who wrote an article on Milton and the First Amendment. He hasn't emailed me back yet (and I'm really not sure he will), but this is the email I sent:

A Mix of Sources

The more I look at what I'm doing, the more I'm realizing that there hasn't been much scholarship regarding the Patriot Act and Milton in an official sense, but there are a few people who have picked up the narrative.

As I will largely be constructing this narrative in the form of modern happenings, I will be utilizing a lot of newspaper articles and press releases and news clips. It will also take awhile to sort through everything I have found to utilize what I want. However, this is my start. If any of you have or come across something juicy, would you please let me know? Thanks!

Areopagitica and the People’s Rights to Information and Government Transparency

Thesis/Opening Paragraph:

Milton’s political tracts boldly declare his belief that in order for the people to be a functioning, self-governing body, they had to have the right to uncensored information. This belief, completely rejected by Parliament, would come up later in American government with the creation of the First Amendment. Yet in America today, we’re struggling with the same problems Milton faced in his time. How do we, as a people, make informed decisions about our government if we don’t have the freedom of information? Is it possible to strike a balance between a transparent government and free flow of information and government secrets and operatives’ safety? Like Milton, we have several figures in the world that are willing to risk their lives for their belief that the uncensored exchange of ideas and information is tantamount for the people to avoid corrupt government, oppression, and social injustice. While many names come to mind, I would like to focus on two main figures in this regard: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Both Assange and Snowden believe that the only way to truly make change for the better is to let people see what’s really going on in all sectors of government and economics. Milton’s premise of freedom of information in Areopagitica completely supports this view. 

A short post

I'm sorry this post won't be very long.  I'm working on narrowing down my topic so that I can make an actual good thesis.  I'm interested in the topic of overreachers, both contextually in the works of Milton and intertextually in the works of those that he was influenced by and those that he later influenced.  Obviously I don't just want to list examples of overreachers throughout literature, so I'm working on narrowing it to an actual defensible argument.  One thing that intrigues me that I've been trying to look at is the idea of Milton himself as a kind of overreacher.  We've said many times in class that Milton was marked by strong ambition--even sense of destiny--that he had to do something great in his life.  We see examples of this in his writing, most notably in the opening lines of Paradise Lost where he states that he is trying to write a poem "That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues / Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme" (I: 14-16).  Milton had to be aware of his own ambition, seeing as how it is a common theme throughout both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.  In PL we see untempered ambition personified in the form of Satan who attempts to usurp the throne of God and fails miserably; while in PR we see the dichotomy of ambition in Christ, someone who is ambitious but who tempers that ambition with patience in waiting on God the Father for instruction.  Which one would Milton have thought of himself as being more like?  Likely, Milton wished he was more like Christ (obviously), while knowing that he was closer to Satan in terms of his level of ambition.  After all, Milton spent his own time in a figurative Hell when he was imprisoned briefly following the Restoration of the monarchy.  Obviously Satan's fall form grace comes from the biblical source, but I can't help but think that part of Milton's inspiration or motivation in writing as eloquently as he did about this fallen angel came from his own experience in over-reaching.

I'm basically thinking out loud in this blog post, which is why it isn't terribly cohesive, for which I hope you'll forgive me.  I like the idea of examining Milton's life and seeing connections between his own experiences and those of the characters that he wrote about.  I also like finding intertextuality between Milton's works (especially PL) and other great works in literature and art.  Anyway, if you have any suggestions on how to narrow this topic down to a concise argument, let me know.  Hopefully my next post will include a real thesis to work off of.  At any rate, I plan on my next post showing more research into secondary sources.

Humility and "Active Passivity" in Paradise Regained

I had a couple of thoughts as I finished Paradise Regained.  One is concerning the ending.  The final image that Milton chooses to leave us with is of Christ, having just defeated Satan in his temptations, simply returning home.  Milton writes, "Thus they the Son of God our Savior meek / Sung victor, and from Heav’nly feast refreshed / Brought on his way with joy; he unobserved / Home to his mother’s house private returned" (Book IV, ll. 636-639).  It's such a small image to end the story on, especially considering the context.  Jesus has just had his first victory over Satan, he has just partaken of a heavenly feast, and a chorus of angels have just told him "thou hast avenged / Supplanted Adam, and by vanquishing / Temptation, hast regained lost Paradise" and "thy glorious work / Now enter, and begin to save mankind" (Book IV, ll. 606-608, 634-635).  The ending does a couple of things for me:  One is that it again reinforces Christ's humility.  After such a triumph and a praising by the angels of heaven, Christ doesn't have a huge celebration to brag about himself to all of the world, but instead simply returns home to his mother, who has no doubt been worrying about him.  

A Well Documented Modern Parallel

I've been seriously considering what I'm interested in writing for the final paper, and based off of my previous blog posts, I've decided to deal with Areopagitica and how it applies to what is currently going on with the NSA spying and the Patriot Act. Back in August, I bookmarked an article from the Guardian that I found interesting and important. Of course this is just the beginning of my research. I fully intend to use my information from my other blog posts about censorship to supplement my current research.

The Guardian also posted a video about how the NSA spying affects you:

Essentially, what I'm exploring is how censorship, even in the form of information gathering, hurts progress because people are afraid to speak freely and the government can attack you if you say things they don't like. Censorship in Milton's day was about preventing those types of things from being published in the first place, and the point of the NSA surveillance and the Patriot Act is to make sure you aren't even thinking about saying things that may undermine the government's ideal state, and it's completely legal under the secret "official interpretation" of the Patriot Act.

After the jump break I'll have a couple of the sections I find critical in this article as well as the quotes from Areopagitica that I find particularly illuminating about the issues we're facing with the problems of the Patriot Act and how the NSA interprets it.

Paradise Lost Quotes and Ideas

I've been thinking about my final research topic, and part of that has been putting together a good number of quotes on different topics. I'm going to be sticking with my initial topic: the reader should see Milton's Satan figure not as the Biblical adversary but as a representation of one of the degrees of fallen-ness in mankind. Truly understanding the work requires that we disassociate Satan from Satan and look at him as a literary character or even as a human. I'll also be touching on Adam/God vs. Eve/Satan and what kinds of implications those associations might suggest in Milton's view of gender, etc. (though that's more of an ancillary point).

Anyway, I figured some of you might have topics that touched on some of the same ideas, so I wanted to post my quote blocks with the hope that others will find some use in them (and maybe throw some ideas back my way). This is something that I would have never done a year or two ago, but Dr. Burton is getting to me in terms of the whole collaboration mentality. There are a lot of quotes here in general, so they'll be posted under the jump break, but in any case, the topics are:

AMBITION, VANITY, REVENGE (Milton = Satan = Eve)
CAPACITY FOR PAIN, DOUBT, SORROW, FEAR
PARADISE INSIDE
COLLECTIVE FALL
MISCELLANEOUS
DESTINY / ANGER AT GOD
SATAN AND EVE
EVIL BY NATURE / REASON AS VICE
VIRTUE UNASSAYED
HUMANITY OF SATAN / STRUGGLES WITH SELF
SHAME / LIGHT