EDIT: Unfortunately Professor Michael Schoenfeldt has had to cancel his trip to Australia at short notice.  Regretfully therefore the following event has been cancelled.  Apologies for any inconvenience.

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions UWA node, Free Public Lecture:

“Places of Pleasure and Pain: Environment and Embodiment in Spenser and Milton”, Professor Michael Schoenfeldt (John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan)

Date: Wednesday 21 October, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre, Geography and Geology Building, The University of Western Australia

While we in the twenty-first century rightly worry about the ways humans contaminate their environment, early modern writers were far more concerned about how the environment contaminates human. Renaissance medicine and ethics conspired to produce a porous sense of self, always in danger of pernicious environmental influences. I would like in this session to explore the ways that England’s two greatest epic poets, Edmund Spenser and John Milton, investigate the relationship between environment and embodiment. Lacking a full vocabulary of inner pleasure, both Spenser and Milton keep projecting pleasure outward into space, into gardens of illicit temptation or divinely sanctioned gratification. Milton learns from Spenser the ability to create landscapes that put immense ethical pressure on his subjects For Milton, though, pleasure has a different ethical valence; his Garden of Eden is a Bower of licit bliss. The Fall of humanity, moreover, entails the primal act of environmental contamination, as the effects of human sinfulness are felt throughout creation. For Milton, finally, Hell is less a physical place than a state of internal agony, and so cannot be escaped. But Paradise becomes as well an internal state, which ameliorates the agony of our exile from the original garden of fulsome pleasure.

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999) and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010); and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006). He is currently editing John Donne in Context for Cambridge, writing a book for Blackwell’s entitled Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry, and researching a book-length study of pain and pleasure in early modern England.