A lecture on Milton

Last week, from the 29th through the 31st, we celebrated the 400th birthday of John Milton at my Faculty. Dr. Mario Murgia was the organizer. There were 5 discussion tables and two Master conferences, one lead by Dr. Alfredo Michel and the other by Dr. Gordon Teskey from Harvard University. George was among the participants, rather unlucky by the way. Besides the conference of Dr. Teskey, he gave a brief four-hour course on Paradise Lost.


The first table was good but with no particularly interesting topics. The second was the one I was expecting the most. First was Alan Page who did an outstanding, but messy, elaboration of the concept of the personification of Milton in William Blake to develop an Epic writing. Dr. Murgia made a resume of his doctoral thesis, with no offense to him ofcourse, on the subject of influence of Milton in the "second" English Romantic poets particularly on Keats.
The third table promised a good insight. Dr. Linares made a good exegesis on the relation of Borges and Milton but it was Mtra. Charlotte Broad who impressed me the most. She gave a Modernist lecture on Milton's food description mentioning several times my two favorite authors, W. B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf. I was amused, impressed and excited by her work, and I even approached her later to ask her about the Modernist contribution to the Epic genre, particularly with the Epic conventions which are a one of my main topics of interest. I did not attend the fourth table.
Next day, the 30th, I arrived very late, just in time to hear the wrecked exposition of George. He made several statements regarding this, ones which I will limit to quote directly via links. Next there was another exposition regarding the "Sublime" in Disney's Fantasia. I think it was a biassed reading of Milton's work, the movie and the concepts which were treated. Last it was the a guy who exposed the Italian sonnets in Milton's career. It was one of the best concerning my litte knowledge on Italian sonnets from the period.

Dr. Teskey's conference was improvised, and even though he talked us down at the beginning he then changed his discourse at the latter stages of the brief course. I liked above all the second part of the course in which we discussed the ninth book of Paradise Lost.

I recorded some of the lectures. Available are the two master conferences, tables one, two and three and the four-hour course of Teskey, in two parts. The quality of the recordings is not as I liked to but they are unserstandable and in some ways clear enough. I apologize since I hav no mp3 tool for editing them.

First Master Conference

Second Master Conference

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

First Part of Teskey's Course

Second Part of Teskey's Course

My favorite expos were Charlotte's, Alan's and Mario's respectively.

It is a good thing that this type of events are being offered, but I think they should be given more often than yearly. Finally I have to say that some of the expos were really awful. The quality developed in some cases were even below standard of university students. In some cases were interpreations, misreadings and over-interpretatiosn. I hope that with this kind of readings this particular cases should be avoided and corrected.