Write 1500-1800 words responding to the topic below. Remember to avoid summarizing the material; instead, focus on making an argument that stays very close to the language of the texts, with plentiful evidence. Check that your thesis or argument is deep and specific enough that an intelligent person might argue against it. And don’t forget to include relevant contexts! Also give historical and relgious context surrounding both authors in the introduction.
Compare Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost with Satan in Dante’s Divine Comedy. To make the topic manageable, please do two things: 1) narrow your intellectual focus: poetically (how God “appears” in words, what kind of language is used to translate the untranslatable onto the printed page), and 2) anchor your respective analysis in ONE meaty passage from each poem. You can cross-reference with other passages, but the best papers will work closely with a relatively small set of lines from each text.
Utililize these specific sources:
The Divince Comedy -Dante Alighieri [translated by Allen Mandelbaum with introduction by Eugenio Montvale and notes by Peter Armour (Everyman’s Library)]
– Inferno Canto XXXIV
Paradise Lost- Milton [Second Edition- edited Gordon Teskey (W.W. Norton & Company)]
-Book 4 (especially lines 1-170)
