Christine Hoffmann’s paper—”Nothing to See Here, Folks: Milton’s Art of Disappearance”—explores the ways in which disappearance gives the impression of vitality in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton broadly realizes the possibilities of fallibility, failure and fallenness through his own illegible posture as the poet vainly presuming to write Eden, and he instantiates for later presumptive reformers the potential for activism within similarly impossible poses. The most distinctive part of Hoffmann’s argument is her connection of Milton’s activism to recent protests of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Hoffmann’s paper is presented at Exploring the Renaissance, the annual conference of the South Central Renaissance Conference, this year held March 8-10 in New Orleans, LA: http://scrc.us.com/index.html
