Of education

Yesterday marked the last official day of my semester, and my day ended with my Milton class. This particular class provides extra impetus for some retro- (if not intro-) spection because it was the first time I'd taught a full-on Milton course.

It was, for most of my students, a long and hard-fought campaign. Especially tough were the early poems. I think I eased the students in on the first day of class with "On Shakespeare," which they found relatively accessible with a few bits of explanation from me. But the second day featured "On the Death of a Fair Infant" and the Nativity Ode, and, well, the students looked at me like I was a madman as I tried to talk about grim Aquilo. That session kick-started some lean weeks, when students struggled to get a basic sense of what Milton was saying. (The most memorable highlight of those weeks: seeing them perk up at the gums of glutinous heat, especially when I mentioned Debra Shuger's wet-dream argument.)

The prose, too, was tough, but students started getting into some of the fundamental impasses in Milton's thought--they were particularly riled up about the clash between championing liberty and freedom on the one hand and a strong sense of propriety and the good on the other. At this point, however, the class sessions started to confirm my fears that students were engaging with some Miltonic ideas, but not necessarily directly with the text. Example: we'd read an excerpt, I'd point out some provocative stuff about it, to which students would often ask, sometimes petulantly, "Are you saying...?" To which my response was normally, "I'm not saying anything. I'm just trying to explain what Milton's saying here." And so forth. Alas, this pattern often dogged our discussions of the major poems. The class did pick up considerably, and I, at least, had a really good time talking through the texts. But I never really was able to shake the feeling that there was too much summarizing and paraphrasing. (I'm not sure if this means I'm more or less resistant to using something like Daniel Denison's "translation"--am I fundamentally opposed to paraphrasing or do I find it unavoidable? If the latter, do I want someone else to do the paraphrasing, or do I want to shoulder that responsibility?)

I tried, as much as possible, to present a balanced Milton, and not just the Milton I happen to believe in & construct in my own scholarship. This proved difficult. Most of the students, for example, bought the Satanist angle even though they seemed impressed by the elegant neatness of the Surprised By Sin argument. I often made qualifications in class like, "For a Satanist/reprobate/sinful reader like me...." But having my own ideas challenged by the material was quite a welcome experience. This time around, I was really struck by how difficult it is to swallow completely the revisionist reader of Samson Agonistes. Perhaps this was the most trite and mundane of epiphanies, but the last several weeks of class made me realize how, as I revise my chapter on Paradise Regained and Samson, I'll have to find some ways to move away from (if not out of) the orthodox/revisionist positions. I think it'll have something to do with eating, but more on that in another post (I dare not say anon).

To the question of what I'd do to improve the course next time, I don't have any crystal clear answers. The difficulty of teaching Milton, especially the shorter, non-lyric poems, is his damned allusiveness. I realized that explaining a juicy allusion is like explaining a funny joke: the very fact of explanation ruins things. There were exceptions, of course, including the dragon's teeth in Areopagitica or the Eve-Narcissus-Echo connection. But even the Cupid-Psyche allusion at the end of Comus was surprisingly tough going. Perhaps my biggest challenge in subsequent attempts at teaching Milton will be to find new ways to motivate students to track down allusions actively on their own. Only time will tell whether that struggle will be Herculean, Sisyphean, Psychic, Promethean, or Narcissistic.