course

Course Credit:  3

As author Giuseppe Mazzotta reminds us, “Imagination is the weapon of the poet.” It’s an old idea, and, wielded properly, the imagination can nudge us from where we are in the present, ferry us back to the past, and transport us into the future. But imagination has its faults according to Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), exiled poet of the late Middle Ages. Imagination or visionariness (the ability or likeliness to see visions) as Dante found out, confounds us when we attempt to describe visions with words. Vision exceeds language and the power of description. In the Divine Comedy, Dante laments how speech is unable to contain the plenitude of what he envisions; that not everything can be elucidated with language. In this sense, the Comedy is a way of thinking about the relationship between vision and language, and equally important, the cultural traction inherent in images. People had deep imaginations in Medieval culture, and artists and illustrators were there to bring those visions to life. Upon examination of the nightmares populating the poem’s Inferno—the fallen Lucifer, serpent-covered Furies, loathsome Harpies, deceitful Geryon, as well as classical figures from the Purgatorio and the crystalline beings populating the Paradiso, all made famous by Botticelli, Bosch, Blake, Doré, and Sandow Birk, among others—we’ll consider the ethics of Medieval Italian culture symbolized by such vivid imagery, but we’ll also prepare ourselves for what the poem is really about: a love so perfect it moves the sun and stars. We’ll also ask what we think Dante was doing in the writing of it. Did he write a romance? An epic tale? Autobiography? A novel? Novel, as in new, marvelous, strange, unexpected? The answer is Yes. The Divine Comedy is all these things, including a remarkably styled circle of knowledge, or an “encyclopedia” in the old sense—knowledge gathering that begins with a point of departure, then takes us along the road of learning to finally return to its original starting point—a point now seen from a different perspective, with a new understanding. In short, Dante uses all the tools of the Liberal Arts to come to know the world around him and to construct a poem of hope, peace, exile, and a story of desire as a witnessing to his imagination, his visions, and to his understanding of love. Prerequisites: None. 3 units.