Ithaca College

The Department of English will be offering a new ICC WI course in the fall of 2019:  ENGL 33200 Milton:  Unconventional, taught by Dr. Dyani Johns Taff.

ENGL 33200 offers students from across the College an opportunity to engage with the poetry and prose of one of the most influential writers in the English language, John Milton, and to consider just how unconventional, challenging, and at times frankly strange, Milton's thinking truly was.  Though most famous for his Biblical epic Paradise Lost (1667), Milton was also an accomplished lyric poet and writer of court entertainments called masques.  He was in addition a political theorist whose involvement with the Parliamentary party during the English Civil War led to the publication of early essays favoring freedom of the press and against monarchial government.  One of these essays, the Ready and Easy Way, nearly cost him his life in 1660.

From the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, Milton was often portrayed by critics and literary historians as one of the western canon's foundational writers, a literary model that succeeding generations of poets could only ever imitate rather than surpass.  Dr. Taff's class questions this hagiographical view of Milton by focusing on his poetic, political, and philosophical unorthodoxies, which may in fact be at the heart of his artistic enterprise.

The full course description is included below.  The WI designation is pending, but will be applied to the class before it begins in the fall.  Please don't hesitate to contact Dr. Taff (dtaff@ithaca.edu) if you have any questions about the course.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Milton’s poetry—including his most famous poem, Paradise Lost—is difficult, opaque, sometimes esoteric. It is also damn good poetry. In this course, we will study not only Paradise Lost but also samples of Milton’s early poetry, his idiosyncratic dramas A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle and Samson Agonistes, and selections from his controversial prose on the subjects of marriage, divorce, freedom from press censorship, and monarchical government. We will also place Milton’s poetry in the context of a few contemporaries who explored related topics in their poems: Margaret Cavendish, Hester Pulter, and John Dryden. We will focus on Milton’s deep and textured knowledge of conventions—religious, social, political, poetic—and on his deeply unconventional attitudes toward sexuality and love, Biblical interpretation, his classical and Renaissance precursors (particularly Shakespeare), and political authority. As a participant in the English Revolution in the 1640s, he supported the execution of King Charles I, whom he saw as a tyrannical king; Milton used his poetry and prose to reflect on and to shape the chaotic political landscape that he inhabited. In his textual landscapes—cosmic chaos, the Garden of Eden, heaven and hell, oceans, caves, forests, deserts, and mountains—he imagines utopias but also prisons and territories ripe for colonial conquest. Studying his writings can spur us to examine how easily an idyllic place might conceal a hell, or a terrifying expanse inspire self-reflection, love, or good citizenship.

COURSE FORMAT/STYLE: Primarily discussion, some lecture.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS AND GRADING: One short essay (3-5 pg) and one substantial research essay (10-15 pg); an individual research presentation; a midterm and a final exam; several forum posts and other small assignments. Grading will be A-F. Because of the discussion-based format of the course, participation will be an important part of students’ final grades.