CRRS Workshop: Timothy M. Harrison: “Negation and Anthropology in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.”
Monday March 10, 2025 at 4pm
Victoria University Common Room 91 Charles Street West
Abstract:
In Paradise Lost, Milton represents a form of human life that is not yet organized by death or the need for self-preservation. Still unfallen, Eve articulates two of its features when she claims that she is “not capable of death or pain.” Why does Milton frame the plenitude, sufficiency, and integrity of paradisal existence by way of incapacities? In this talk, I argue that the connection Milton makes between human life and the language of negation—prefixes like non-, in-, un-, and dis-, negative particles like not—stems both from his training in logic and from his understanding of human rationality.
About the Speaker:
Timothy M. Harrison is Associate Professor in the Department of English, the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, and the Philosophy of Religions in the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is the author of two books: Coming To: Consciousness and Natality in Early Modern England (2020) and, with Elizabeth D. Harvey (Toronto), John Donne’s Physics (2024). He is currently working on two books: The Anthropology of John Milton and, with Jane Mikkelson (Yale), Horizons of the Mind: Experiences of Self and World in Early Modern Persian and English Poetry. He is a co-editor of the journal Modern Philology.
