Paul Stevens’s office is nondescript—largely undecorated, with a plain view. The walls are bare, except for one, which is lined from floor to ceiling with books. This eclectic library is the first clue to the mixed bag of Stevens’s diversity and scope of knowledge.
Professor Stevens, as any of his students can say, is remarkably talented at enriching his lectures with topics that run the gamut from the hellfire sermons of puritan America to the made-for-TV movie he watched last night. Combined with his unpretentious wit and genuine interest in student dialogue, it is no wonder Stevens is one of 10 finalists chosen by TVO as the best lecturers in Canada.
Adam Lee, a student of Stevens, described him as “ultra casual. You would think by the way he includes the students in the class that he was just speaking off-the-cuff, but then he begins to spin an elaborate web of an idea.”
Fellow student Cindy Williams echoed this sentiment. “He was always able to give context to very complex concepts,” she said. “He made 17th century literature come alive, [with] often outrageous and irreverent humour.”
“Milton’s Satan is a presence in our culture,” Stevens told me. “You can actually see how it’s genealogically linked. How someone reading in the late 18th century, reading Milton’s Paradise Lost, then produces a character like the Indian called Magwar, a version of Milton’s Satan.”
“And then somebody else reads that, and produces another version. For example, Byron’s Corsaire, a pirate, who’s just like Milton’s Satan. But where it gets really fascinating is that that seeps into Hollywood. Byron’s Corsaire will become Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and you can run it right up to recent times, where it always seems to me that when I’m looking at the artist formerly known as Prince, it’s a kind of version of a Byronic hero, and that Byronic hero is itself a version of Satan.”
Stevens’s experiences reflect his diversity of knowledge. Rather than following the typical academic path, Stevens said he was “absolutely, totally, infatuated with the army,” and enlisted at 18.
He fought for three years as an ordinary soldier, and then went to university. After earning his Master’s degree, he returned to the army as an officer and performed a wide range of duties, from commanding a rifle platoon in Northern Ireland to guarding Rudolph Hess, a Nazi war criminal who was held in West Berlin. “What fascinated me about it was a sense of joining history, that you were part of that history,” said Stevens on guarding Hess, “which, at that age, was very exciting.”
After two years back in the army, he said he missed the openness of intellectual life and returned.
Stevens uses his wide-ranging knowledge and experience to make literature relevant and vital to his students. In studying Milton, he said he wants the students to discover “the roots of their own culture, or the culture in which they live.”
