Dr. C.’s Learning Web

Class Presentations in the Milton Seminar: Some Guidelines

You are to be a litterateur, a guide to the text for the class. You might think of your work as an oral preface to the text, an introduction to it or some aspect of it. Introductions need to be general and specific; they often work best when they move from the former to the latter, although I’ve seen it work in reverse, too.

Your presentation should last 35-45 minutes, enough time to distribute your materials and report on your findings and make something out of (part of) your findings, then to inspire and lead us into our discussion. You are not responsible for the entire class period, nor should you feel responsible for “covering” every aspect of the text you’re working with (an impossibility). You should give the class textual context (what kind of a thing is this poem/paragraph/essay/drama/episode/book, and where might one connect it with other products of Milton’s imagination?) and critical context (what have some other readers made of this thing?). Your presentation should not last longer than 45 minutes, or there’ll be no time for discussion.

Your presentation should begin with a brief overview of the work you’re presenting on: a summary of key events in a book of Paradise Lost, or the biographical/historical/cultural background of a lyric or a prose work. Having set the stage and oriented your audience, you should then proceed to the specific focus of your presentation: a theme, a crux, a critical debate, a question or set of issues, etc. Always engage specific moments in the text. Close reading is an essential foundation for any critical work, and you’ll keep the class interested and involved if you actually read the poetry aloud instead of merely generalizing about it.

It’s also very important to give the class a good overview/analysis of the “state of the question” in the criticism you’ve read. Bring your secondary work to bear on your close reading; weave the two together. You should include evaluation and interpretation in your presentation: this scholar is helpful, this one less so, this one not at all; the text pulls us in this direction and not in that one; this question is a red herring or has a clear answer, that question is much more important for liberating the text’s multiplicity, etc.

You are, in short, modeling an informed and responsible reading for the class, one that has considered the primary text with special care and sought to place that reading within the conversation of some other informed readers, i.e. critics and scholars (secondary sources). You can’t be comprehensive, just as you can’t be purely objective, but you can be useful, thoughtful, inspiring, responsible, creative, and (perhaps most important) suggestive. One Milton scholar has described the work of an informed and responsible reader in terms of two vows: the vow of rigor, and the vow of obedience. Rigor invites us to bring ourselves and a community of knowledge and opinion to bear on the text before us; we interrogate the text, and we continually seek to refine our questions and re-present the text (and its context) more faithfully or suggestively. Obedience invites us to allow the text to mark us, to question us, to write us into being or bring us into fuller being, to hold us up as evidence of its power, its loveliness, its fertility, its disruptiveness. Try to honor both commitments.

All presenters must meet with me at least three times: at the outset of their research, no later than 48 hours before the presentation to discuss their plans in detail, and no more than 48 hours after their presentation for a debriefing session. During each conference, in addition to discussing your research, we will also discuss effective speaking strategies and work on speaking skills. I strongly urge you to make an appointment at the Speaking Center for more help with the delivery of your presentation.