10 Years After

Lost Weekend

Literary Criticism was interesting today. More talk about Marxist criticism. I will definitly use this rather than psychological analysis for the joke I am suppose to read and analyze next week.

Milton felt like a complete bust. First, the journal entry that I wrote up last time was returned and I received a 7 out of 10. His comment was that it was an interesting topic, the two-fold images that Milton uses in Paradise Lost, but that he took points off since it dealt more with earlier books than the ones we were reading for the week. This seems a bit strange since I had written well beyond the blasted word count he asked for and the parts from earlier books, mainly book II, support the thesis that Milton appears, so far, to use this sort of imagery throughout. In reality, I think the instructor has a set idea of what is an issue in Paradise Lost and most things outside of this box are uninteresting to him. I've noticed that while he has copious handouts about various critics and their statements about PL as either a whole or part, he seems unable to discuss these arguments in any sort of objective light. The best example is William Empson. While he hands out snippets of Empson's criticism of Pradise Lost, he seems wholey unable to discuss the view other than to offer C.S. Lewis as an opponent. I find this especially frustrating since I think that, as of yet (Book IX), Milton is failing to do that which he states at the start he wishes to do - justify God to man. One significant problem is Milton's combining a Christian omniscient/omnipotent god with one displaying characteristics of a Classical Greek deity. Essentially, ignorning God's omniscient for the majority of the story in order to relieve God from any implication of allowing bad things to befall or by his attitude in the face of perilous events. Furthermore, and I'm not sure that Empson discusses this, but Satan, despite Milton's comments as a narrator of sorts to the opposite, is drawn essentially as unable to choose the right thing even when he realizes what the right thing is. This seems a far cry from free will. Throughout the story free will doesn't seem to be what dictates people's actions, rather it seems their actions are thos based on their nature. Determinism seems to be at work even within the structure of the poem.

Secondly, and most frustrating, the paper I worked and reworked so hard on was returned. I received an 82. He docked points for lack of internal citation and for, and his notes are unclear, either making a distinction that isn't made in"Lycidas" or not making a distinction in my paper when the poem does. I knew I would loose some points for the citation. Finishing it at 5am I was too tired to go back in and re-add them after the computer fried my disk. However, if I had known he would have let people off so easy for not doing their presentations the day of, I would have just gone to bed normally on Saturday, skipped the presentation and instead worked on my paper Sunday, and then turned it in Tuesday, doing a presentation for the class.

He didn't even regard the presentations in his rubric for grading. In fact, it was discovered that he wrote good poster on some students papers that used handouts rather than posters. Very strange to ask students to give up a Sunday afternoon, do a presentation before a disinterested audience, and then to not factor that into their grade- even if as nothing more than a pass/fail grade. I think I should have been compensated for my out of class participation.

I'm not sure about the comment on the distinction between the Catholic church and corrupt Anglican church. I'll have to reread my paper and try to figure it out.

Regardless of the lackluster grade on the paper (as far as I can tell the highest grade was a 94), I think I can still pull an A. I have some friends that said they would certainly go and read some at the Miltothon so that I can receive the extra-credit. This'll bring my paper grade up, in effect, to a high 80. I think he said it was 7 points extra-credit. I'll also receive the extra-credit in my Literary Criticism. Although there I think it comes up to 15 (7 for going myself and 8 more for brining a friend). Yeah, basically I need to be a point-whore in class to ensure an A.

All this has me slightly worried about the next paper. I'll try to finish it a week early and ask him to read over it. The class is beginning to remind me of my poetry class and the instructor's odd subjective grading of analysises of poems. I ende up with a B+ in that class and I don't want a repeat of it in Milton.