[Milton-L] 'Making Milton Matter'???? was Smokey Mountain...

[James Rovira]

It always seemed to me more than half of teaching was selling your
subject to your students.  Maybe more than 2/3 or more than 3/4.  I
try to do this by demonstrating some continuity between past and
current cultural products.  So, when teaching PL, I might begin with
Milton's Satan, show how that character influenced romantic authors'
character development, then suggest modern equivalents in the same
vein; e.g. Heath Ledger's Joker in the latest Batman.  The painfully
cliche "you and me, we're just alike" speech that villains inevitably
give to heroes about 3/4 of the way through contemporary action films
might be traced to Satan's "myself am God" speech in PL, and how much
can we see of Satan's attitudes in the lyrics of, say, Nine Inch Nails
or Marilyn Manson?   Probably a bit of a stretch, but it's an
interesting possibility -- something for students to pursue.

I'm teaching Brit Lit I right now and found the recent Beowulf 3D film
a good point of contact for both Beowulf the text and Arthurian myths.
 I could talk about how the building in which the attacks took place
was probably a hunting lodge in the text, and that there's an
association with the notion of "horns" -- then ask how this was
reflected in the film (it was).  I could say the film follows the same
pattern as the text -- B vs. Grendel, B vs. Grendel's mother, B vs.
the dragon when B is an older man.  But it significantly changes the
outcome of the second episode to introduce sexual temptation and
falleness themes that pit B against his own son, repeating the
Morgan/Mordred/Arthur triangle in many Arthurian myths.  Why did the
filmmakers deviate from the plot of B the text in this way and how
does that make the film mean something different from the text
version?  Why was that deviation deemed necessary for contemporary
audiences?  How have the values/assumptions embedded in the text
differ from that in the film version and why?  Is the film version
more psychological than the text?

And suddenly they have to start paying attention to the text to find
answers to these questions.

Jim R

On Sun, Sep 21, 2008 at 12:43 PM,  <jfleming at sfu.ca> wrote:
> In my opinion, a sense of having encountered something that matters is
> inseparable from and foundational to an interest, whether provisional or
> professional, in any text or set of texts, not just Milton's. The desire to
> articulate that sense seems reasonable, even urgent. Articulating it as a
> question, moreover -- why _does_ Milton (seem to) matter, anyway? -- seems,
> if anything, maximally coherent. Finally, answers that approximate the logic
> of (the otherwise great) Armstrong, when he defined jazz ("if you don't
> know, I can't tell you") seem to me both theoretically and pedagogically
> regrettable. Regards, JD Fleming
>