COML533 - Dante & New Developments in Medieval Italian Narrative

The course begins by considering the two key Italian predecessors to the Dantean opus: Durante’s sonnet sequence, Il Fiore (an Italian adaptation of the Roman de la Rose) and Brunetto Latini’s Il Tesoretto. We then turn to Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio to analyze how these new literary departures were utilized. We will simultaneously focus on the interrelated problems of authority, representation, history, politics, and language in Dante’s deeply innovative texts. The conclusion of the course examines two important texts of Boccaccio and Petrarch that take the newly canonical Dante as a key point of departure. On the one hand, Boccaccio’s La Teseida explicitly explores war as an epic matter in its Dantean context. On the other hand, Petrarch’s Latin Africa is an implicit correction of Dante’s Commedia, written in the Italian vernacular.<br />
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