Marvell-ous!

Came across unfinished drafts of some blog posts I meant to do about a month ago.  Since I am now officially finished all my exams, as a tribute, I post them for your reading pleasure:


PARADISE LOST


I'm always hesitant to read the classical "greats": there's an almost unapproachability - what if I don't like their work? Does that mean I'm uncultured and without artistic taste?


It's different with Shakespeare, Dostoevsky.  To me, they were givens, real enough to relate to, genius enough to be questioned.  But Homer, Ovid, Milton have seemed too solemn in their cracked leather binding, worn and pored over by multiple minds, extolled by thinkers, expounded and expanded on through the works they inspired.


Tonight it was Milton.  Our professor's been teaching Renaissance literature for 23 years, and I think her passion for the works of this multilingual master was the clue I needed in order to commit enough to this epic undertaking.  They say that there's a great epic about every 1000 years: Homer's Odyssey and Illiad, Dante's Divine Comedies, and Milton's Paradise Lost...


MARK TURNER: LITERARY CRITICISM AND ORIGINALITY IN TEXTS (note: "THE ROOM")

When you come across a room in a text, you are coming in contact with a wholly unoriginal concept; we all expect to find rooms in which the characters will move, converse, and struggle because in our own experiences we interact with that environmental space.  And though we may find the dried lavender hanging from a tack pushed into the polka dotted backing of a gilded gold frame a more original construct within the work, it cannot exist in the same capacity without the unoriginal, and indeed more complex, matrix of the room.

The dependence of the original on the unoriginal is an integral concept of Mark Turner's essay "Poetry: Metaphor and the Conceptual Context of Invention".  Turner also explores the use of the conceptual metaphor within texts such as Pilgrim's Progress, The Bible, and...