Dante's Commedia is the story of a journey back from personal and societal Hell, through self-knowledge and friendship. The book itself is an act of friendship. It never disappoints. It teaches itself. It has been engineered to improve design thinking and emotional intelligence in its readers in proportion to their commitment. It prompts readers to experience knowledge as a communal and continual endeavor. Its metaphors are accessible irrespective of time, linguistic or socio-cultural barriers. Its characters and their voices brought solace into the darkest corners of modern history. The book is human craft and ingenuity at their best. The ways in which notions and ideas are encoded in Dante's Commedia are testimony to the capabilities of the human mind at investigating and preserving the diversity of the world, and the interconnectedness of all matter.
This introductory course has been designed to make Dante's masterpiece accessible and relevant to students interested in a variety of disciplines and bodies of knowledge. The readings and lectures are intended to provoke free inquiry and critical thinking into a highly complex linguistic object, and the information contained therein.
The course has two principal aims. First, through guided and independent 'reverse engineering' - by exploring the text piece by piece - and by working closely with the professor, students will gain an understanding of the mechanisms and potentialities of verbal language and of poetry in particular, as the conjunction of verbal language and music. This will help you to become a better writer and a better reader: more sophisticated, less credulous, more perceptive. Second, the course will introduce you to a key period of world's history, the European Middle Ages, its practical realities and its key spiritual, scientific, political, and artistic dilemmas. This is the time that saw the emergence and flourishing of new languages over Latin; of academic communities; that established the separation of religious and secular power; that saw the first monastic rule written by a woman.
