Posts Tagged John Milton

That’s the end of Season 2, folks. We’ve had a great time doing the show, and we’re glad you listen. We explain our summer plans in the show itself. Keep listening, and keep reading!

General Introduction
- So long, Season 2
- Listener feedback
- What’s on the blog?
- Our summer plans and our love for decimal places

Beginning Apophatically
- Literary criticism vs. critical theory
- The Academy and the newspaper
- The professor and the amateur
- The unconscious and the conscious
- Literary criticism vs. book reviews
- Why age is more than a number
- The bleeding edge of criticism

Auden Makes the Rules
- Historical context
- Overcome evil with good
- Subjectivity
- How to tell if a critic is any good
- Development of taste
- The pleasures of the text

Old Stuff
- The extreme POETIX! of  Chuck “Ham-Bone” Aristotle
- Dorothy Sayers’s internalization of Aristotle
- The gaping hole of the Anglo-Saxon period
- Boethius and his epic, tragic harlots
- Philip Sidney to the rescue!
- Milton’s dismissal of fiction
- The Calvinist aesthetic defense of Scripture

The Aesthetes and Decadents
- The critic as artist and the artist as critic
- Creation vs. criticism
- Rules for independent critics
- Why Wilde would like Lester Bangs
- Complicating, not explaining
- What does “art for art’s sake” actually mean?

A New Kind of Criticism
- Connection to the Southern Agrarians
- Reaction to the Old Historicism
- Text as self-contained and unified
- Why the New Critics overreacted
- New Criticism as all-consuming blob

Mythological Criticism
- Deeper into Tolkien
- The Mythography Project
- Finding patterns in mythology
- Frye’s embrace of archetype
- The Gospel’s role in myth criticism

Heroic Criticism and American Studies
- The Heroic Critic as true believer
- Defining the newly emergent America
- Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination
- The difference in seriousness
- Intellectual decline
- [] you, you bourgeoisie pig!
- Defining Americanism(s)

Jiving Criticism and Art
- Why poets can’t write well about poetry
- Historical moments
- The need for critical distance
- A fist-fight breaks out!!
- Artists who do great criticism
- Is this a difference in eras?
- The problem with self-accounts
- Michial prepares for hate mail from creative-writing students
- Does scholarship create better writing?

Getting Personal
- To what extent is our academic output literary criticism?
- Auden makes David self-aware
- Nathan’s Hegelian synthesis
- Michial tries to complicate, not simplify

Post-Theory Criticism
- The Emmanuel Laboratory
- Nathan as the singular Voice of Criticism
- David fights to stay in the middle
- The non-academic return to Auden’s world

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Auden, W.H. The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Bangs, Lester. Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. Ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Vintage, 1988.

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. San Francisco: Hill and Wang, 1975.

Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Victor Watts. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry. New York: Mariner, 1956.

Calvin, John. The Institutes of the Christian Religion. Trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Ed. John T. McNeill. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960. Two volumes.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. San Francisco: New World Library, 2008.

Chesterton, G.K. Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2009.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985.

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. London: Methuen, 1976. 47-59.

Fiedler, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor, 1992.

Frazier, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frye, Northrop. Biblical and Classical Myths: The Mythological Framework of Western Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004.

Jung, Carl. Jung on Mythology. Ed. Robert A. Segal. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2006. Two volumes.

Milton, John. Paradise Regained. The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. New York: Oxford UP, 2003. 619-669.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1987. Three volumes.

Patterson, Lee. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1987.

Ransom, John Crowe. The New Criticism. New York: Greenwood, 1979.

Sayers, Dorothy L. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sidney, Sir Philip. “The Defence of Poesy.” The Major Works. Ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. 212-251.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007.

Tolkien, J.R.R. “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Ed. Christopher Tolkien. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983. 5-48.

Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination. New York: New York Review of Books, 2008.

Updike, John. Hugging the Shore: Essays and Criticism. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Weston, Jessie. From Ritual to Romance. New York: Waking Lion, 2008.

Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” The Major Works. Ed. Isobel Murray. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 241-297.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. New York: Penguin, 1996.

The music this week is Bruce Cockburn’s “Creation Dream,” from Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws (1979).

General Introduction
- Reader feedback
- What’s on the blog this week?

The Genesis Account of Creation
- When did we first encounter it?
- Oh, those strategic bushes!
- We take another shot at Robert Zemeckis’ Beowulf
- The Breeches Bible
- We plan Nathan’s first book

Scholarly Approaches to Bereshith
- Is the first clause independent or dependent?
- A plurality of versions of every story
- The “telescope” theory
- Other creation stories in the Hebrew Bible

Extrabiblical Ancient Creation Stories
- Enuma Elish
- The Rig Veda
- Gilgamesh
- What do we have to fear from these similarities?

New Testament Creation Accounts
- What does John 1 add?
- Christ as the “first fruit of creation” and “wisdom of God”

Greco-Roman Creation Stories
- Plato’s Timaeus
- How do the Gospels react to Platonic ideas?
- Where does John get his Logos language?
- Hesiod and Ovid
- Love as the first element

English Creation Stories
- Caedmon’s Hymn
- Anthropocentrism
- Why Caedmon is not the first English poet
- Mystery plays
- Paradise Lost: Milton’s hedged bets

Where Have All the Creation Stories Gone?
- The Enlightenment
- Romantic individualism
- Post-Darwin literature
- Evangelical anxiety
- Lewis and Tolkein
- Hesitancy as hallmark of modern creation story
- Scientific origin stories

Advantages and Disadvantages of Creation Stories
- A call for humility
- Making doctrine out of poetry
- The multiplicity of stories

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bede. Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Trans. Leo Sherley-Price. New York: Penguin, 1991.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Experience.” Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 471-492.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of the History of Creation. Trans. L.W. King. New York: FQ Classics, 2007.

Hesiod. Theogony, Works and Days, and Shield. Trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Lewis, C.S. The Magician’s Nephew. New York: Collier, 1977.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. David Raeburn. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Plato. Timaeus and Critias. Trans. Robin Waterfield. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Rig Veda: One Hundred and Eight Hymns. Trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Tolkein, J.R.R. The Simarillion. Ed. Christopher Tolkein. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004.

This week’s music: “Her Right Hand Rules the World,” by They Sang As They Slew, from Get Well (Northern Records, 2004). Great band, great record, great Tolkien reference.

General Introduction
- Nathan’s back, and he’s angry at us
- Another CHP ex cathedra announcement

Defining and Misdefining Epic
- Thanks, FailBlog
- That’s so random
- What’s a B-side?
- Aristotelian definition: epic as footnote to tragedy
- Unity on a grander scale

General Conventions of Epics
- What’s our favorite?
- Michial lays his cards on the table
- The descent into hell
- Why O Brother, Where Art Thou? bothers Nathan
- Epic similes
- In media res

The Nationalist Aura
- C.S. Lewis objects
- The shattering of national identity in The Odyssey
- Who owns Beowulf?
- The American search for national identity
- Are The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost epics?
- Primary and secondary epics
- Why Americans are jealous

Mikhail Bakhtin’s “Epic and Novel”
- A bit on Bakhtin
- The epic as dead form
- Epic distance
- Closed-offness
- We critique Bakhtin
- Michial praises poststructuralism (gasp!)

Mock Epics and Adaptations
- Why the mock epic died
- Garden State descends into hell
- Where is the Underworld in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Movies
- Why The Dark Knight is a novel, not an epic
- The period war film
- The Tolkien-ification of the Middle Ages
- Demythologizing the epic
- Michial defends two versions of Robin Hood
- Let’s hate on Troy; or, the world-weary ennui of Achilles
- David rants about the Robert Zemeckis Beowulf
- Demythologizing the hero
- Nathan ughs the Paradise Lost movie
- Your chance to win a Christian Humanist Podcast windbreaker!

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ariosto, Ludovico. Orlando Furioso. Trans. Guido Waldman. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Butler, Samuel. Collected Works. New York: BiblioLife, 2008.

Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Dorothy L. Sayers. New York: Penguin, 1950. 3 volumes.

Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Vintage, 1989.

Harmon, William, et al. A Handbook to Literature: Second Edition. New York: Prentice Hall, 1995.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Peter Jones. New York: Penguin, 2003.

—. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. Poems and Other Writings. New York: Library of America, 2000.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Norton, 2004.

Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry. New York: Penguin, 1985.

Song of Roland. Trans. Glyn S. Burgess. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. New York: Penguin, 1979.

Sturluson, Snorri. The Prose Edda: Norse Mythology. Ed. and Trans. Jesse L. Byock. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: One Volume Edition. New York: Mariner, 2005.

Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2008.

UPDATE: Some supplementary resources cited obliquely by David: the first as the scholarly source of the much loathed King Arthur film, the second as a reading of Beowulf sensitive to the openness of narrative speech:

Littleton, C. Scott, and Linda A. Malcor. From Scythia to Camelot : a radical reassessment of the legends of King Arthur, the Knights of the Round Table, and the Holy Grail. New York : Garland, 1994.

Robinson, Fred C.  Beowulf and the appositive style. Knoxville : U of Tennessee, 1985.