Learning and Loving in Paradise Lost

Abstract

abstract:The representation of learning in Paradise Lost provides an antidote to the pressured, anxiety-producing experience of higher education today. Demonic, divine, and prelapsarian ways of thinking in the poem prepare the ground for showing that Adam and Eve’s way of learning is not a lesser process after the Fall but rather the sign of their having taken possession of their full humanity. Their postlapsarian errors and failures lead to the rethinking that learning depends upon, while the need to nurture their intimate, loving, and complex relationship ensures that their learning does not become abstruse and separate from their lived experience.