Every class, Prof. Aers opens by asking what we thought of the day’s reading, and every time there’s a long pause that follows. I don’t know what’s going through the heads of my classmates, but for me it’s usually something along the lines of “I have no idea what any of this means.” John Milton is not an easy writer to understand, and when reading I often find myself with far more questions and uncertainties than concrete discussion points.
So we suffer the silence together until someone summons the courage to speak, and from there we begin, working as a class to figure out what exactly this man is talking about. Thus our seminar is set in motion, and we start to talk, making our cases, asking questions and giving answers, all the while supplemented by Prof. Aers’s borderline-wizardly ability to illustrate the relevant background information on any subject at the snap of a finger. But he’s not just a human encyclopedia. With a wry smile on his face and a British accent on his tongue, he’s constantly pushing us to look closer, think harder, and ultimately to draw more out of the text than we ever thought we could.
Today we’re focusing specifically on books seven and eight of Paradise Lost, and almost immediately we find ourselves deep in an examination of cosmology, creation, and history. The scope of Milton’s magnum opus, and pretty much everything he wrote, is astonishing. In a dozen lines of poetry or a paragraph of prose, we can move from science to politics to theology, each one gilded by Milton’s gorgeous language.
But no matter what we read, or what topics we discuss, the trial is never far away. Like Pandemonium in Paradise Lost, our seminar is – or aspires to be, a place of debate and of trial – where you learn by challenging the beliefs of your peers, and in turn being challenged by them.
English Department
