ENGL 380-01, Dante in Translation: The Poetics of the Body, Spring 2009

Abstract

This course will focus on the work of Dante Allighieri, the fourteenth-century Italian poet who translated his vision of the Christian afterlife into his epic poem The Divine Comedy, and whose work has had a profound influence on English writers from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot. We will read a few of the works that Dante read—including parts of Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustine’s Confessions—and we will follow the thread of one of Dante’s preoccupations: the body and its relation to love, language, sin, and salvation. Dante’s poem, in its construction of the saintly Beatrice—Dante’s muse and spiritual guide--as well as its critique of courtly love, provides insight into medieval conceptions of gender and sexuality. In addition to primary texts, the course will include some theoretical readings, medieval and contemporary, on gender, sexuality, and the body. All readings and discussion will be in English.