This seminar will be led by Dr. Elise Lonich Ryan, University of Pittsburgh

When we make a mistake, we may describe our situation as being in error. Error comes from the Latin root errare, which means “to wander.” In stories of the Fall, humans wander morally and ethically from a given command and are forced to wander out of one home and into another. Importantly, this wandering leads to landscapes and consequences not always foreseen or of their making but that have direct impacts on their bodies, minds, souls, and hearts. I’ve given you excerpts from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Lucy Hutchinson’s Order & Disorder, two seventeenth-century epic poems that use the Genesis account of the Fall as an imaginative springboard for poetic exploration of such wandering (even down to the wandering lines of verse). As you read Satan’s speech upon viewing the Garden of Eden (from Milton) and Hutchinson’s description of the consequences of the Fall on women’s bodies, consider how the revelation of error hurts. How do the poetic voices here articulate pain? Why care about the emotional textures of wandering at all? Does pain bridge creaturely divides? How does the form (poetry) convey feeling?

Readings: Milton and Hutchinson