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

[Schwartz, Louis]

Thank you, Gregory.  That's beautiful and true.

Here is your brain:  ...

And here is your brain on Milton:  insert favorite passage AND READ
CAREFULLY AND IMAGINATIVELY (like this....). 

This morning in my seminar it was Comus being ravished from pleasing
slumber and sweet madness to sober certainty and waking bliss (and not
quite getting all the way there).

Last week it was "Wanton heed and giddy cunning"

And that's just the first couple of weeks.

Later on, we'll be wrestling, as Gardner put it, and the stakes will be
getting higher.  A temple will be built, but not finished, another will
fall, the earth will moan, chaos petrify, breasts will meet through a
veil of hair.  Hateful things will be said, and tears wept--and wiped.
And wept again.  Already I'm no longer always the first one to grab hold
and grapple.  In fact, I've been thrown to the mat a couple times.
Who's that standing on the pinnacle? Who's that falling?

When I'm worked up about these things, the last thing I'm thinking about
is anyone for whom it might not matter.  That peculiar intensity, that
sense of mastery and being mastered, of being embraced and expelled, of
embracing and expelling, teaching and being taught, is the only argument
I've got.

Is there a better one?

L.

===========================
Louis Schwartz
Associate Professor of English
University of Richmond
Richmond, VA  23173
(804) 289-8315
lschwart at richmond.edu
 
 
 

-----Original Message-----
From: milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu
[mailto:milton-l-bounces at lists.richmond.edu] On Behalf Of Gregory
Machacek
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2008 1:13 PM
To: John Milton Discussion List
Subject: [Milton-L] Making Milton Matter To . . .

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

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