A week of tough decisions. I've decided to go to Edmonton, Alberta this fall to do an MA in English at the University of Alberta. In the process I've had to reject offers from the University of Victoria and the University of Ottawa; both have strong programs and attractive locations with high price tags attached to them. The rationale for my choice certainly had to do with funding and living expenses, but I'm not just choosing UA because it has the deepest pockets. It has a significant collection of rare books (not to mention the second largest collection in Canada), some of which will be of considerable use for my work on John Milton and early modern literature more generally. In addition to more traditional literature courses (one on Shakespeare and the commons, another on travel literature from Chaucer through Jonathan Swift and more recent postcolonial poets), I plan on taking a course on Derrida's later work, a course on "The Politics and Aesthetics of Literary Reading," and (hopefully) course on cultural theory with Imre Szeman, who studied under the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson at Duke.
Initially, I intended to focus on the concept of authority in Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained with attention to its manifestations in theology, politics and the literary/poetic tradition as Milton saw it. If this seems vague and overly broad that's because it is. Writing a statement of purpose for applications can feel incredibly arbitrary. I tried to touch all the bases with mine, even throwing in a few words on the "death of the author." Although, I may not in fact write a thesis, I think this idea will become more grounded as time passes. From the start, I knew that I wanted to tie this in with the Protestant emphasis on the the centrality of the Word and consider how Milton's pair of epic poems construe reading, faith and reason.
My first real encounter with reader response theory comes by way of John Milton. The 1970s seem forever ago, don't they? They right well should. My parents hadn't even met each other yet. Still, every text on Milton in our library seems to predate 1976. Luckily, Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin was first published years before the cut-off date and I have a copy sitting beside me as I type this. The choice quotation from Lamentations gracing the title page ("Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the Lord") leads me to believe that I will enjoy rummaging through this batch of dated essays.
What have I been doing lately? Why, reading Paradise Lost, of course! All 12 books of it in a mere 12 hours last weekend. Grueling? Yes. Boring? Certainly. Worthwhile? Uhhh...probably. There's even a press release. Yes, I've been growing fond of Satan, the cheeky little bugger. After I reflected on Satan's seeming childishness in class today, my professor carried my comment through a nice analogy. He's like an adolescent who, after being sent to their room, spitefully resolves to rebel against his parents as the ruler of his bedroom (a solitary space all his own, to do with as he pleases). So deluded is the boy that he fails to realize that the entire house belongs to his parents. The room is not and will never be his alone. Thus Satan is bound, though his speeches weave together threads from great mythical spools; from the epic poets and all their labours, for everything is written as though "the mind is its own place."
The song he'd be singing, sporting short-shorts like Stuart Copeland (or something even more revealing):
I think Sting would make a good Satan. He's certainly got the hair for it.
A week of tough decisions. I've decided to go to Edmonton, Alberta this fall to do an MA in English at the University of Alberta. In the process I've had to reject offers from the University of Victoria and the University of Ottawa; both have strong programs and attractive locations with high price tags attached to them. The rationale for my choice certainly had to do with funding and living expenses, but I'm not just choosing UA because it has the deepest pockets. It has a significant collection of rare books (not to mention the second largest collection in Canada), some of which will be of considerable use for my work on John Milton and early modern literature more generally. In addition to more traditional literature courses (one on Shakespeare and the commons, another on travel literature from Chaucer through Jonathan Swift and more recent postcolonial poets), I plan on taking a course on Derrida's later work, a course on "The Politics and Aesthetics of Literary Reading," and (hopefully) course on cultural theory with Imre Szeman, who studied under the Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson at Duke.
Initially, I intended to focus on the concept of authority in Milton's Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained with attention to its manifestations in theology, politics and the literary/poetic tradition as Milton saw it. If this seems vague and overly broad that's because it is. Writing a statement of purpose for applications can feel incredibly arbitrary. I tried to touch all the bases with mine, even throwing in a few words on the "death of the author." Although, I may not in fact write a thesis, I think this idea will become more grounded as time passes. From the start, I knew that I wanted to tie this in with the Protestant emphasis on the the centrality of the Word and consider how Milton's pair of epic poems construe reading, faith and reason.
