English 122 - Spring, 2021

Milton

Class Information

Instructor: Werth, Tiffany Jo
Time: TR 3:10-4:30
GE Areas: World Cultures Writing Experience

Description

In this course, we will be engaging with some of the seminal works of John Milton, including Paradise Lost and a sample of his early poetry and prose. Our way of reading will explore the built environment of the story as poem: its sound, its verse, its rhetoric, and its characters. We will be particularly attentive to the worlding (that is the world building) that the language of the poem enacts. Simultaneously, we will be exploring the poem as story by noting its origins, atmosphere, and climate environs. We will follow its crosshatching of multiple worlds and life forms?including human beings, vegetal, mineral, animal, and more-than-human entities?as they traverse space and time. We will be attentive to how matter, energy, information, and physical laws or cosmology, as well as religious views, constrain and construct domains. We will also examine Milton?s unconventional representations of creation, the natural world, and human systems such as justice and government. As we read, we will ask what it means to be human and how the stories we tell might create interpenetrating dimensions, alternate planes, potential futures.

Classroom Practice: Our Tuesday class session will be held asynchronously with pre-recorded lecture modules available from the date and time specified on the official university schedule (T 3:10 ? 4:30 PM PST) for one week from published date. Our Thursday class will meet synchronously during a segment of our scheduled class time in a weekly reading lab (TH 3:10 ? 4:30 PM PST). Your weekly tutorials will also be held synchronously during the scheduled university class time. They will be divided into two sections of 25-minutes each to facilitate stronger small group interaction. You will be assigned to one of two pods within your tutorial. You will be need to indicate your participation with audio / voice and chat so come prepared to talk and share with your group and classmates. There will regularly be brief timed group breakout sessions.

Grading

Top Hat Course Engagement (Total 25%)
Weekly Reading Quizzes (lowest score dropped) 10%
Class Engagement, questions, and polls via Top Hat 15%
First Essay close reading exercise (3-4 pp / no secondary research) 20%
Research essay (8-10 pp. including revision) 35%
Cumulative Final Exam 20%

Texts

Paradise Lost. Edited, with Introduction, by David Scott Kastan. , Milton, John.
Top Hat Response System ISBN 9780986615108