The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Podcast for Social Research, Episode 84: Paradise Lost and Its Revolutionary Afterlives — Orlando Reade in Conversation

·1 hr 12 min·5 clips

Reed argues that “reading disobediently” may be the best way to honor Milton’s radical spirit.

1. The Podcast for Social Research episode centers on Orlando Reed’s first book, What in Me is Dark, and its focus on Paradise Lost. 2. Rebecca Ariel Port, a member of the core faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, hosts; Orlando Reed is the author; Anadella Subin, Katie Cadu, and Rebecca Port’s fellow panelists join as readers and critics. 3. The episode asks what Paradise Lost does for readers now, and Reed’s answer is that the poem survives through “disobedient reading.” 4. Reed says he began the book in January 2021, after finishing a PhD and while tutoring wealthy children in London from a friend’s spare room. 5. He explains that teaching in the Princeton Prison Teaching Initiative and a seminar on Paradise Lost at Princeton made him rethink who the poem was for. 6. Reed says his book follows 12 readers or reader-groups, including Thomas Jefferson, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, a Haitian anti-colonial philosopher, Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, Malcolm X, C.L.R. James, Jordan Peterson, and his prison students. 7. He describes the project as a way to bring the “delights of Paradise Lost” to new readers without treating Milton as a pure academic duty. 8. The excerpt shifts to a youth correctional facility on the Delaware River, with Reed describing the tree-lined drive, frost, fields, and the prison’s dark-glass architecture. 9. Reed says the prison opened in the late 1960s, during the expansion of the prison system under Lyndon B. Johnson, and he links that setting to mass incarceration. 10. He contrasts the ivy league university and the prison, but says the prison classroom could be just as intense, literary, and intellectually serious. 11. A student once told Reed he saw men in the prison carrying Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, which Reed uses to show the scale of inmate reading. 12. Reed says his teaching had to answer a hard question: how can literature matter to people without sounding patronizing or depressing? 13. After the 2016 election, Reed remembers the Princeton campus in shock, an unusually cheerful escort at the prison, and students who already knew the results would affect funding, sentencing, and release conditions. 14. In a later class at an adult state prison, Reed taught Shakespeare’s meter and then introduced Paradise Lost with the opening line, “Of Man’s first disobedience.” 15. A student he calls Mark pointed out that “the first line is disobedient,” because “disobedience” can be counted in ways that disrupt the line’s order. 16. Reed treats that observation as evidence that freedom is embedded in Milton’s verse as well as in the poem’s politics. 17. He says Paradise Lost gives readers a “peculiar freedom” to make choices and mistakes, and that later readers have honored and radicalized that darkness. 18. Reed names Virginia Woolf, Hannah Arendt, and Malcolm X as readers whose interpretations show how Milton can be reworked through history. 19. The discussion style is an academic panel with long, layered responses, frequent quotations, and a reading that moves into close literary analysis. 20. Listeners who want Milton, prison education, and political reading will find this episode useful, while listeners who prefer short, light conversation may skip it.

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