Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education,” Scott F. Crider

By

pedagogy

“Dante reveals to students the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. The end of a liberal education is an experience of the Love that created both the subjects of a liberal education and the human persons in need of that education, and Dante achieves that purpose. Through truth and virtue, he becomes wise, and his wisdom sets him free.”

“Without ever addressing the point explicitly with students, I can let Dante reveal to them the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. Dante certainly imagined liberal education as constituted by the trivium and the quadrivium—the arts of word (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and those of number (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music)—as propaedeutic to the study of philosophy and theology, and he imagined poetry, in a work he wrote on the Italian language, De vulgari eloquentia, to be the liberal art combining the consummate art of language and the consummate art of number: ‘Poetry [is] a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music.’ For our purposes, I will hazard a tautology and say that a liberal education liberates. That is, it frees us from error into understanding of the most significant question: How should we live?”

[. . .]

“Virgil’s guidance has been necessary for Dante, but it is not sufficient. His guidance has profound limitations that make it both helpful, given where Dante was, but needing to be surpassed, given where he is going. Imperfect pedagogy, thank goodness, can still save, just not by itself. Students need more than one teacher because of the limits of the master.”

[. . .]

“The relationship between Dante and Beatrice is a suggestive representation of the tendency in pedagogic relationships to confuse the teacher for the thing taught, and to allow one’s shared love of the material to be lost in the distracting presence of the one revealing the material. Guru-ism is a perversion of a truly saving pedagogy—a distortion of a legitimate attraction. Beauty is a salvific distraction, provided the beautiful one reminds us of that which truly saves.”    — Scott F. Crider, Public Discourse, August 21, 2021

Sante Matteo, “Escape from Paradise,” Twelve Writers

By

“Before Beatrice fled from Florence to Venice and beyond in my story, she migrated from the classroom to the written page, then set sail and found a welcome dock at Twelve Winters Journal.

“A course I taught on the Divine Comedy drew students with a wide spectrum of academic interests. I encouraged them to undertake a term project related to their field of studies, as long as it included an account of their research and how their secondary sources contributed to the creation of their final product (a bit like this commentary). Art students handed in paintings and sculptures; music students composed, performed, and recorded musical pieces; writing majors wrote poetry and stories; theater majors wrote and staged plays; film students scripted, shot, and showed movies; philosophy majors wrote Platonic dialogues. My office became a museum of intriguing works of art.

“Beatrice often figured in the students’ projects, which gave me the idea for a piece that showed how things might have looked through her eyes. After I retired and began to dabble in ‘creative writing,’ I emulated my students and took on the project of drafting a story presented from her perspective. [. . .]” –Sante Matteo, “Commentary on ‘Escape from Paradise’,” Twelve Winters

Read Sante Matteo’s story “Escape from Paradise” at Twelve Winters‘ website here.

See also Sante Matteo’s poem “Assignation” (here) and his essay on Dante and baseball (here).

Contributed by Sante Matteo

“Stai fermo un girone: Un gioco per scoprire Dante e il suo mondo”

By

“‘Stai fermo un girone’ è un gioco concepito sul modello del tradizionale ‘gioco dell’oca,’ dedicato all’Inferno di Dante Alighieri e alle discipline della ricerca umanistica coinvolte nello studio del Medioevo.

“Per avanzare e vincere non occorrono soltanto conoscenze sui canti, i personaggi e i temi infernali, ma ci si dovrà anche confrontare con diversi metodi di indagine applicati ai testi negli studi universitari: questa, anzi, sarà la porta d’accesso per guardare all’opera dantesca sullo sfondo dell’intero Medioevo, con la sua storia, le sue idee, la sua cultura, i problemi che si è posto e le risposte che ha provato a dare. Il gioco potrà servire a stimolare e consolidare l’apprendimento in studenti delle superiori che incontrino per la prima volta i versi danteschi, o essere occasione per tutti gli appassionati per rivivere e ricordare – in maniera più disimpegnata – letture del passato. Grazie ai suoi tre livelli di difficoltà, infatti, si adatta a tutti i giocatori, dai principianti agli esperti.

“Il formato stampabile e ritagliabile permette a ciascuno di costruirsi il suo set di carte, segnalini e tavola da gioco e di immergersi nell’Inferno e nel mondo di Dante.”   —Milano University Press website

The game—created by Guglielmo Barucci, Paolo Borsa, Rossana Guglielmetti, Luca Sacchi, and Roberto Tagliani—is available for download here (online since December 2021; last accessed January 9, 2022).

Contributed by Osvaldo Varieschi (MA, Florida State University ’23)

 

Dante’s Purgatorio, video game by Charlie McKinney

By

Charlie McKinney of DeMatha Catholic High School (Hyattsville, Maryland) built a text-based video game based on Dante’s Purgatorio. The game was created as a project for ethics and theology teacher Homer Twigg’s unit on Dante’s Purgatorio in 2021. Check out the game here.

Akash Kumar, “A Dante Who Valorizes Difference” (2020)

By

“Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy in 2020 is not without its challenges. In 2012, the UN-sanctioned human rights organization Gherush92 proclaimed that Dante’s poem was discriminatory, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and should not be taught in classrooms. For some years now, I have taken this objection as my point of departure in crafting my Dante course and promoted a reading of the poem that interrogates issues of social justice with respect to the representation of religious and cultural difference, gender and sexuality, and social class. In the wake of a summer of protest, I felt all the more impelled to bring such considerations to bear in my Dante class this Fall. [. . .]”   –Akash Kumar, “A Dante Who Valorizes Difference,” The Medieval Studies Institute Blog, Indiana University

Akash Kumar is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Indiana University. Read his full essay on teaching Dante through the lens of social justice here.

Recent Dante Citings

Categories

Submit a Sighting

All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.

How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

Creative