The Long Education Instruction and Interpretation in Milton's Major Works
Item
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Title
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The Long Education Instruction and Interpretation in Milton's Major Works
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:161d3986b321:11158
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identifier
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11564
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Creator
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Davis, Zachary M.,
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Contributor
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Joseph A. Wittreich
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Date
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2012
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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English literature | Areopagitica | Education | Milton
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Abstract
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This dissertation examines the development of John Milton's views on teaching and learning and argues that each of Milton's major works contains within it a search for an effective pedagogical model. By performing close readings of key primary texts and grounding those readings within the historical context of shifting educational theory in the seventeenth century, this work attempts to demonstrate the ways in which Milton's texts foreground literature's pedagogical function while simultaneously questioning the ability of texts to engender spiritual and moral impacts on their readers. This study also attempts to trace the growth and maturation of Milton's views on education from the early works---especially Of Education and Areopagitica---in which Milton stresses the importance of the teacher, whether it is an individual or a text, to Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, works in which the authoritative, educative voices of the texts are often unreliable and, in many cases, misguided. Milton's commitment to a pedagogy that is capable of producing reformed readers, both in a spiritual and a civic sense, is in many ways incompatible with the pervasive concept in his works that the true source of learning is the expression of internal self-sufficiency brought about by external trials. This work argues that this incompatibility leads to conflicting attitudes toward teaching and learning in Milton's life and in his texts. The work concludes with a thorough exploration of Samson Agonistes, in which the text's unrelenting refusal to provide decisive valuations of the moral and spiritual justifications of its characters actions constitutes a pedagogy of uncertainty that is directed squarely at the reader.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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English
