Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, second edition
- Editors: Christopher Kleinhenz, Kristina Olson
- Pages: 312
- Published: 2020
- ISBN: 9781603294690 (Hardcover)
- ISBN: 9781603294270 (Paperback)
“Overall, the volume has the rare power of infusing new life into teaching practices, inviting instructors to question and innovate their modes of reading, analyzing, and discussing the Commedia within diverse classroom environments.”
Dante’s Divine Comedy can compel and shock readers: it combines intense emotion and psychological insight with medieval theology and philosophy. This volume will help instructors lead their students through the many dimensions—historical, literary, religious, and ethical—that make the work so rewarding and enduringly relevant yet so difficult.
Part 1, “Materials,” gives instructors an overview of the important scholarship on the Divine Comedy. The essays of part 2, “Approaches,” describe ways to teach the work in the light of its contemporary culture and ours. Various teaching situations (a first-year seminar, a creative writing class, high school, a prison) are considered, and the many available translations are discussed.
Preface (xi)
Part One: Materials
Overview (3)
Italian Editions of the Comedy (3)
English Translations of the Comedy and the Minor Works (4)
The Instructor’s Library (5)
Part Two: Approaches
Introduction: Dante’s Comedy in the Classroom (21)
Textual Traditions, Language, and Authority
Dante, Teacher of His Reader (36)
Teaching the Divine Comedy from Its Manuscripts (45)
Duels of Interpretation: The Bible between Dante and the Church (59)
Following Virgil’s Lantern: Teaching Dante in the Light of Antiquity (67)
Dante Casts Shadows over the Legacy of the Classical Past (73)
Teaching Dante, Beatrice, and Courtly Love in the Divine Comedy (80)
Dante and the Spectrum of Medieval Vernacular Poetry; or, How Giacomo and Joyce, Brunetto and Eliot, and Bertran and Pound Rhyme (88)
Transnational Dantes (96)
Society and Ethics
Sodomite, Homosexual, Queer: Teaching Dante LGBTQ (103)
Conceptions of Women and Gender in the Comedy (110)
Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy in a History Course (120)
Dante and the Papacy (126)
The Quest for Ethical Self-Reflection (134)
Teaching the Theological Dimension of Dante’s Comedy (140)
Dante, Poet of Loss (148)
The Reception of the Comedy
Teaching Dante and the Visual Arts (154)
Reading Dante’s Comedy with Giotto (164)
Rewritings and Relevance: Teaching Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills alongside Dante’s Inferno (170)
Teaching Dante through Music (175)
Dante’s Afterlife in Popular Culture (185)
Elizabeth Coggeshall
From Poem to PlayStation 3: Teaching Dante with Video Games (192)
Instructional Contexts and Pedagogical Strategies
On Selecting the “Best” Translation of Dante (200)
Damned Rhetoric: Teaching Dante’s Inferno in Translation to Undergraduates (210)
Dante’s Comedy as First-Year Seminar: From Early Engagement to Self-Reliance (216)
Writing like Dante: Understanding the Inferno through Creative Writing (223)
Scaffolding Scholarly Research for a Senior-Level Course on Dante in Translation (231)
“Cliques in Hell”: Teaching Dante to Nontraditional Students (238)
Teaching Dante to High School Seniors (245)
Teaching Dante in Prison (252)
Beatrice in the Tag Cloud (257)
Notes on Contributors (263)
Survey Respondents (269)
Works Cited (271)
“The variety of approaches delineated in this volume showcases the imaginative richness of Dante’s work.”
—Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching
"The authors in this volume expertly address both traditional and new trends in Dante scholarship, covering the field and breaking new ground. The editors do a superb job of bringing these themes together and providing a context for them."
—Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin College