[Milton-L] Making Milton Matter To . . .

[Gregory Machacek]

It seems to me that the phrasing in the original posting has occasioned
some of the disagreement here.  It suggests an either/or binary.  Either
Milton matters or he doesn't.  So Michael Bauman's argues  that Milton
"already does matter," whereas many others speak of how Milton doesn't
initially seem to matter to students, and they take it as their job to
"make" him matter to them.

Bauman is right.  Milton already does matter . . . to some people.  But the
other posters are right as well.  Milton doesn't initially matter to many
of our students.  Can he be *made* to matter?  Probably not, if we imagine
that making as involving explicit persuasion.  I find that the more
strenuously you work to convince students that something matters, the more
their defenses go up, and the *less* inclined they are to believe you.
They'll pretend to value it, for a semester, because you are grading them,
but once the semester is over, they'll think of its value as suspect,
precisely because you felt you had to make a case for it.

I've started to think of my pedagogy as boiling down to "valuing Milton in
front of students."  I don't try to convince them to value Milton.  I don't
even explain why I myself value Milton.  I don't even so much any more, as
James Rovira, does, try to relate Milton to something they do already
value.  I just sit in front of them and do it, value Milton.  I enthuse
over passages.  I get carried away developing interpretations.  I show
students myself loving Milton.

One of Girard's insights is that we value something in large measure
because we see someone else valuing it.  Insofar as I try to make Milton
matter, I do so by dramatizing for students what it looks like to have
Milton matter to one.

All of the other disciplines are -ologies; they talk about things.  We
philologists (and the philosophers) love something.  What we have loved,
others will love, and we will teach them how.  And we will teach them how
precisely *by* loving.

If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


Greg Machacek
Professor of English
Marist College