HNAR-319: Dante's Inferno

More than 700 years ago, a man from the Italian city of Florence, pretty much on his own, invented the idea of creating characters based (somewhat) on his own life experiences. His name was Dante Alighieri, and he became so important to the development of European literature that we have come to know him simply by his first name, Dante. The story he told was of a single person's journey through the Medieval Catholic Otherworld, that is, a journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. He called his work a comedy (Commedia in Italian) and his first biographer, Giovanni Boccaccio (arguably the inventor of the novel as a literary form), pronounced the work "Divine." Since then, the whole trilogy has been know as the Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia, in Italian.) In this course we will closely read the first book of the Commedia, Hell (L'Inferno) in which the main character, also called Dante, is guided through the horrors of Hell by the Roman poet Virgil. The journey is surreal, horrifying, sometimes funny, often touching. It is also, in addition to being one of the great stories, an encyclopedia, into which the author Dante poured all his knowledge of the 14th century world: spiritual, psychological, philosophical, political, astrological and scientific. The Inferno has been an inspiration for artists, writers, musicians, theologians and scholars for almost as long as it's existed. Together we'll delve into the strange, dreamlike, always exciting world that Dante created. The gates of Hell, according to Dante, have an inscription that ends with the famous sentence, "Abandon all hope you who enter." In this course we'll keep hope alive as we lower ourselves into the inferno with one of humanity's great and compelling poets.