Study Questions (4): Divine Comedy; Inferno (Dante)

Humanities 1010

Lange / Fall 1998

Choose one question or raise your own issue to discuss in a total of one page. Make sure you do not repeat yourself. Please type your answer.

Due Date: November 21, 1998 (Friday)

1. What is the significance of Dante's use of ancient classical sources--characters, monsters, etc. How do they function--what is their role?

2. Discuss Virgil's role as Dante's guide. Why does Dante choose him? What does he represent to Dante? What values does he embody?

3. Discuss the Inferno as a transitional text mediating between the Medieval and Renaissance cultures. Treat Dante's fusion of realist and spiritual dimensions and his openness (with limits) to Classical cultures.

4. Do a character study of Dante, the pilgrim. What type of man is he? What does he learn from the journey through hell?

5. Interpret a canto or a representation of a particular sin with attention to Dante's poetic treatment. Read beneath the literal level for the spiritual or metaphorical meaning of the words, events, and images.

6. Discuss the significance of the incidents in which Dante falls of faints.

7. Examine the role of Dante's major women, Beatrice and Francesca, as they relate to the dominant images of women in medieval theology--as daughters of Eve or Mary.

8. Discuss the representation of Ulysses/ Odysseus in Canto XXVI. What is his sin?

9. Compare and contrast the Pilgrim's steps in Plato's Symposium with the pilgrim's journey in Dante's text focusing on the role love plays in each journey. In what sense is the love between Dante and Beatrice "platonic"?

10. Discuss ways in which Dante's Inferno and the medieval cathedral reflect the period's interest in allegory. How does the allegorical structure encode medieval values?

11. Compare Dante's style of characterization to Giotto's.