Month: February 2018

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Beatrice Bradley on “Sweat in Paradise Lost”

Please join the Renaissance Workshop
and the Early Modern and Mediterranean Worlds Workshop
Friday, February 23, when

Beatrice Bradley
PhD Student, English
University of Chicago
presents the paper:

“Creative Juices: Sweat in Paradise Lost”
FRIDAY 23 FEBRUARY
3:00-4:30
ROSENWALD 405

***Please note the unusual date and time***

There is no precirculated paper for this workshop. Light refreshments will be served.

***This event is cosponsored with the Early Modern and Mediterranean Worlds Workshop***

If you would like to join our email list, please click here. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Questions, requests, and/or concerns may be directed to Beatrice Bradley (bbradley@uchicago.edu) or Jo Nixon (ejnixon@uchicago.edu). 

Image Source: In Sudore Vultus, Anonymous, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, ca. 1600

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Abstract: Gordon Teskey on “The Bible and the Poetry of John Milton”

The Bible and the Poetry of John Milton

“To love the Torah more than God is protection against the madness of a direct contact with the sacred.” Emmanual Lévinas, Difficile liberté: Essais sur le judaisme
“Language, therefore, cannot make its own possibility a totality and include within itself its own origin or its own end.” Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the thought of Emmanuel Lévinas”

I shall be concerned here not with the details but with the general problem of the relation between the Bible and Milton’s major poems, that is, not with annotation alone, which is endless—or in Lévinassian terms, infinite—but with the total form of this relation, a double one, with spread wings. To the one side, the entangled verbal density of the Bible enters into Milton’s major poems as their limitless substance, a substance not unlike the original state of Milton’s God, ‘filling infinitude’ and infinitely dense (Paradise Lost 7.168-69). On the other side, the major poems enter into the Bible, they intervene, at particular moments (the Fall of Man; the Temptation of Jesus; the agony of Samson), energizing the Bible from within and giving it a total poetic form. What then, in the poet’s mind, is the authority of his major poems in comparison with the authority of the Bible? Is the relation between them one of dependency or of equality? This is an iteration of the question I have asked in earlier work, ‘Who has the authority to create?’

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Gordon Teskey on “The Bible and the Poetry of John Milton”

Please join the Renaissance Workshop
Monday, February 19, when

Gordon Teskey
Professor of English
Harvard University
presents:

“The Bible and the Poetry of John Milton”
MONDAY 19 FEBRUARY
5:00-6:30 PM
ROSENWALD 405

Please note there is no precirculated paper for this workshop. Light refreshments will be served.

If you would like to join our email list, please click here. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible to persons with disabilities. Questions, requests, and/or concerns may be directed to Beatrice Bradley (bbradley@uchicago.edu) or Jo Nixon (ejnixon@uchicago.edu).

Image: Anselm Kiefer, Am Anfang, The Hess Collection