After reading the sections we were given of Ovid, Lucretius, Genesis, the Dryden translation of Metamorphoses, and the books of Paradise Lost, I can highlight specific thematic patterns I noticed. First of all, each text is about creation, and each mentions chaos. All spend a significant amount of time detailing the creation of man. This could include how God took a rib out of Adam and used it to create Eve (I thought that was fascinating, as it was something I never knew and then the words man and woMAN were explained, which truly made me stop and think), how Jove destroyed the first human race and recreated a second one (this baffled me – why?), or how, in Genesis, the seven days of creation are explained. However, despite their similarities, each text differed from the next. Lucretius stood out to me, as it seems to me to be the most on par with what we think scientifically about the way the world came to be. It discusses molecules, atoms, and particles, and the creation of the earth, which seems more advanced and less outdated than some of the ideas presented in the other texts like the story of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Ovid.
Do not get me wrong, I thought it was lovely that people grew out of stones once they were thrown into the earth by either Deucalion or Pyrrha and I found it comforting that the Earth was the womb and incubator for the first humans. I simply think this idea sounds, at its root, more mythological than the concepts of Lucretius. Additionally, God was mentioned in Genesis, Dryden, and Paradise Lost, but not in Ovid or Lucretius at all, similarly to how Satan was mentioned in the former but not in the latter. I know there is likely a reason or a purpose for this, and it would be interesting to examine the roles that God and Satan play in each text to determine why some of them function well without God and Satan and some do not. I thought it was interesting that each text also referred to characters such as Sin, Chaos, Death, and others. This intrigued me because, for example, in order to personify Sin, Milton had to think to himself about what embodies sinning and wrongdoing and package that all into a person. In this way, Sin is a reflection of what Milton thought were the worst, most evil actions, allowing us to learn more about our author through his writing. This thought reminded me of Greenblatt and self-fashioning. Not only do Sin, Chaos, Death, Satan, etc. remind me somewhat of the Alien, Authority, and the Self, but they are the product of some self-fashioning done by Milton and cultural forces around him. I speculate that we will take a step back and zoom out in this season of class. With these texts, the topic is the original creation of the universe, which includes the initial creation of the self, but does not necessarily include finding ourselves as we do through self-fashioning. I predict we will be learning and talking more about the different theories of creation, dissecting them, and comprehending the uniqueness of each message.
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