Dante’s Divine Comedy: Inferno

Composed in the early 1300s, Dante’s Divine Comedy has, through eight hundred years of changing world views and aesthetic tastes, been considered as great a work as any ever written in a European language. For this course we’ll read and discuss, canto by canto, Inferno, the first book in the trilogy, with glances back to Dante’s earlier poem, The New Life, and forward to the trilogy’s other two parts, Purgatorio and Paradiso. For class discussion we’ll add pertinent works created over the centuries by major artists and illustrators.

Readings:

Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy (transl. John Ciardi ), ISBN 978-0451208637 or any other translation.

George Young, with degrees from Duke and Yale and teaching experience at Grinnell, Dartmouth, and UNE, has for several years offered courses on Russian and world literature at OLLI and MSC.

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