Fanfic?
This is the kind of crap that I write when I am insecure about a class, in particular the final paper.
Revised Paper Proposal (F Version)
I will be honest and blunt because that seems to work for me when I want to make a point: I've changed my mind on the paper topic because I really don't care about temptation and the fall and I feel pretty shitty about it. What truly interests me is examining the role of Galileo's telescope in Paradise Lost. I have not used a telescope in the past twelve years of my life and, claiming Socratic knowledge of ignorance, really know nothing about them. But as I am the sort of person drawn to things I do not understand, I have been tempted by the shiny appeal of telescopes, glass, and arguing against critics who make me want to rip out my hair.
Galileo's invention is only mentioned three times yet the criticism defining its signficance exists in generations. Maura Brady lists a shorthand of the multiple interpretations of the telescope in her essay Galileo in Action (131). The critics difer in interpretating the telescope as an extension of vision to a symbol of knowledge born from ignorance, yet every critic agrees on at least one thing: Galileo's invention is undeniably associated with spots and Satan. The spots are of particular interest since most every critical article argues that the significance of the spots lay in the fact they are blemishes on an unblemished surface. The question that came to mind to me was: what is a sunspot? Thus I whisked away to the engine known as the Google machine in search of articles by authors that knew what a sunspot was really and nothing about Milton (as those are the types of scholars that tend to know about sunspots). And lo! I learned that sunspots are temporary phenomena. Thus the interpretations that assumed the spots should be associated with evil were not truly true because that evil would disappear over time.
Well this was certainly exciting but I thought to myself, "did Galileo know nothing of this?" Intrigued, it finally occured to me that the rift in criticism comes between historicizing Galileo's object and the common knowledge known to the not-so-average Joe in the year 2011, something the Milton critics seemed to have forgotten back in the seventeenth century. A topic finally dawned on me: how is a contemporary reading of Paradise Lost, with the advanced knowledge of sunspots and telescopes, different compared to the Renaissance reading, challenged by the discovery of sunspots and the limitations of prototype telescopes, with particular interest to sunspots? How does this progress exemplify Milton's understanding of gaining knowledge?
I, the struggling, stressed, and suicidal undergraduate, do not have the answers to these questions yet but I hope to come to a better understanding by the time I complete this paper. I understand that I do not have a perfect understanding of either Milton or sunspots, but I at least think I can enlighten the Milton critics to something they have foolishly overlooked and contribute criticism of justice to this amazing epic.