CEMERS Speaker Series: 32nd Annual Bernardo Lecture

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies invites you to join us on Thursday, November 10th at 5:30pm in the Admissions Building: Room 189 for the 32nd Annual Bernardo Lecture

Joseph Luzzi, Professor of Comparative Literature, Bard College

"Pushing the Boundaries: Dante's Ulysses and the Limits or Literary Criticism"

Dante's Inferno 26 has long been considered one of the summits of his literary art, as the tour de force canto has elicited a remarkable amount of scholarly commentary and inspired authors ranging from Mary Shelley to Primo Levi, among others. In my talk, I would like to review the history of critical commentary on the canto with an eye to showing how, in the case of certain texts like Inferno 26, traditional scholarly procedures and protocols can fail to account for some of the more mysterious and hidden meanings of a work. Alternately, I aim to show how non-scholarly approaches to the canto of Ulysses in works of the imagination can help us understand Dante's text in ways that the scholarly record cannot. More broadly, I would like to reflect on how this issue of scholarly "boundary crossing" into realms of the literary imagination is thematized in Inferno 26 itself, as it vigorously considers issues of limits and borders in all their moral and aesthetic complexity.

This talk presented by The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and co-sponsored by the Romance Languages Department

Please also join Special Collections 50th Anniversary Open House 2:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. immediately preceding the annual Bernardo Lecture. Special Collections is located on the second floor of Bartle Library, North. The Petrarch Manuscript and other early Italian texts from Prof. Aldo Bernardo's collection will be on display

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