Teaching Paradise Lost: Radical Contingency, Comparative Studies, and Community Engagement

This essay connects a reading of Paradise Lost to an exhortation for the field of Milton studies, reflects upon my recent pedagogic activities at the University of Denver, and offers suggestions for teaching that emphasize comparative studies and community engagement.¹ My work here derives from my teaching at all levels (from first-year undergraduates to doctoral students) at the dynamic intersections of my community's contiguous cohorts.

My argument is this: Paradise Lost is a work of radical contingency beyond Milton's control that likewise exceeds our best efforts to grasp the whole poem, thereby engendering an open work in a vital field of endless variations upon the text's history of adaptation, interpretation, and production. Milton scholars and early modernists should therefore subordinate their desires to control the text (via established critical methods) to the work's generative legacy of artistic collaborations (among authors, editors, musicians, painters and printers, translators and typographers, et al.). Comparative studies across disciplines may be energized in meaningful ways for twenty-first-century students through community-engaged practices that amplify the poem's inherent openness to diversity, multimodality, and transferrable skills. We should celebrate the epic's living legacy through spontaneous acts of open-access knowledge sharing and experiential learning that could be transformational for the path forward for literary studies. Within the limited scope of this essay's appearance in this cluster, my focus for comparative studies and community engagement will concern literary adaptations of Paradise Lost with particular emphasis given to the multimedia fields of book arts and letterpress printing.

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Great works of literary art are so much greater than any individual or collective work of scholarship. Indeed, such classics are more than the sum of their parts at every moment in their journeys through time: from their engagements with their source materials and historical moments to their processes of inspiration, composition, revision, production, distribution, exchange, adaptation, interpretation, remediation, and translation.² Such texts are beyond the control of their authors and audiences because their complexities escape capture and conversion; such classics are vibrant, open works that "display an intrinsic mobility, a kaleidoscopic capacity to suggest themselves in constantly renewed aspects."³ We should embrace this vital spirit of the open work's radical contingency. By radical, I mean a fundamental concern for and critique of the linguistic roots of reality; by contingency, I mean chance affinities among materials and methods that are neither designed nor foreseen—yet still possible due to either present or absent accidents, conditions, or forces. Paradise Lost is certainly intricate, but it is not "designed like a complex clock."⁴ Paradise Lost is a poem of baroque asymmetrical structures and signal escapes engendered by numerous discontinuities within and across the work's individual books as well as among the many paratexts added to the poem after the first three issues of the 1667 ten-book first edition.⁵ Considering these countless edits, revisions, and chance variables involved in the epic's journey from the 1667 edition to the 1674 twelve-book second edition, we should read, discuss, and teach Paradise Lost as a work of radical contingency that emerges from collaborative and collective efforts, including the text's dictation, transcription, revision, and preparation for printing and distribution, as William Poole's Milton and the Making of Paradise Lost (2017) thoroughly demonstrates. We should celebrate the work's multimodal legacy in the spirit of Blake's illuminated poem that strives to correct Milton's vision by breaking apart his overdetermined selfhood.⁶ Numerous kindred literary adaptations of Paradise Lost reimagine and refashion the poem's materials and methods for modern audiences, such as Erin Shields's Paradise Lost (2018); Danny Snelson's RADIOS (2016); Pablo Auladell's Paradise Lost (2014); Ronald Johnson's RADI OS (1977); and John Collier's Milton's Paradise Lost: Screenplay for Cinema of the Mind (1973), just to name a few.⁷

Milton's paradoxical refrain, "know to know no more," underscores these principles and reflections in ways that exceed ready explanations—notwithstanding the best efforts of countless editors and scholars...