Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Publication

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

Haas, Judith P.
Citations
Altmetric:
Contributor
Photographer
Artist
Editor
Advisor
Keywords
English, Department of, Syllabus, Curriculum, Academic departments, Text, 2009 Spring
Local ID
Collections
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.
Description
This syllabus was submitted to the Office of Academic Affairs by the course instructor.