AIS: Dante's Commedia as Poetry, Philosophy, and Theology.

Catalog description

This course examines Dante's Commedia as an "encyclopedic" poem, a term that the Dante scholar Giuseppe Mazzotta has used to characterize the poem's educational ambitions. This is a poem with a deep intellectual program; it takes on many of the great philosophical and theological questions of its own time, and ours, too. What is the nature of the soul? What is just punishment? What is the highest good? Yet it does this not within the context of a philosophical treatise but an imaginative journey through the regions of the afterlife, taken by the poet himself. Our aim in this course is to analyze the poem in all of its overlapping dimensions - as a great poem of ideas, as a spiritual evaluation and testimony (a confession?), as a travelogue that doubles as a series of philosophical dialogues, as a mosaic of unforgettable images.