PARADISE LOST

This class will focus on John Milton’s 1667 epic poem about the creation of the world and the fall of humanity; Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel about a scientist’s creation of life; and Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel about a small, rural, all-black town in Oklahoma. In addition to the explicit echoes between these books, each work is interested in the relationship between the natural world and human beings; gender difference, relations between the sexes, and the reproduction of human life; and the bases of, and threats to, an ideal society. By reading these three works of art in sequence, we will thus look at how authors engage similar issues in different ways, paying particular attention to the role of history, nation, genre, politics, literary tradition, and authorial identity. Finally, we will consider the ways in which authors’ revising, refuting, and re-envisioning of “source” texts affects our readings of the “source” texts as much as the new.