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Piero Boitani
2005 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Dante and Italian Studies
Professor Boitani received his Laurea in Lettere from the University of Rome "La Sapienza" then went on to earn degrees from Wittenberg and Cambridge Universities. Currently professor of comparative literature at La Sapienza, Boitani has been a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Connecticut, Ohio State University and Keio University in Tokyo, and is a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
 Professor Boitani has authored a great number of books, including Chaucer and Boccaccio, English Medieval Narrative of the 13th and 14th Centuries, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, The Shadow of Ulysses: Figures of a Myth, The Bible and its Rewritings, and, with Notre Dame University Press, The Genius to Improve an Invention. His most recent books are Parole alate
(Mondadori, 2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Piero Baranski's visiting professorship at Notre Dame during the fall of 2005 is co-sponsored by the Devers Program in Dante Studies, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, the Medieval Institute, and the College of Arts and Letters. He is scheduled to teach a graduate seminar titled "Calvino & Levi: the narrative of Primo Levi and Italo Calvino" and the undergraduate course "Dante I."
ROIT 40115 — DANTE I
"Dante I" normally covers the Inferno and Dante's minor works, but this fall it will be slightly different. After a general introduction to Dante’s works and to the structure of the Divine Comedy, the course will examine major scenes and themes specially grouped to enable us to read through the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Such will be, for example, the themes of the “noble heart” (from Dante’s early works to the Paolo and Francesca scene in Hell, and onwards), of the dignity of the human being (from Limbo to Farinata and Cato), the episodes of Ulysses and Ugolino, the various accounts of the Donati family, the recurring versions of Creation, and the final vision of God.
Text: the paperback edition of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso published by Oxford University Press with the translation of John Sinclair. Exams: there will be a mid-semester test before the break, and a final exam before Thanksgiving.
This course is crosslisted with LLRO 40145, MI 40552, MI 60552, ROIT 63115.
ROIT 63211 — CALVINO & LEVI: THE NARRATIVE OF PRIMO LEVI AND ITALO CALVINO
We shall read all the major novels and selected short stories of Levi and Calvino, the two greatest narrators of the second half of the twentieth century in Italy. From Levi’s account of his experience at Auschwitz, Se questo è un uomo, and of his odyssey back home in La tregua, a new, painful awareness of the human being takes shape, which will be deepened in Se non ora, quando? and in his last book, I sommersi e i salvati. At the same time Levi’s work as a chemist inspires some of his best short stories in Storie naturali, Vizio di forma, Il sistema periodico, and La chiave a stella, where science becomes literature.
A similar impulse is present in Calvino as well, whose Cosmicomiche and Ti con zero belong to the genre of humorous science-fiction. Calvino’s paradoxical tales (the trilogy of Il visconte dimezzato, Il barone rampante, Il cavaliere inesistente) develop into an exploration of the mechanism itself of narrative in Le città invisibili, Il castello dei destini incrociati, and Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.
Texts: all the books by Primo Levi listed above are published in paperback by Einaudi; those by Italo Calvino in paperback by Mondadori.
A final paper will be expected.
This course is crosslisted with LIT 73859.
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