Heather Webb (Yale University), “The Botanical Affects of Dante’s Comedy” (Italian Studies)

Event time: 
Thursday, October 24, 2024 - 5:30pm
Location: 
53 Wall Street, Room 208 See map
Event description: 
Department of Italian Studies presents
The Annual Dante Lecture
 
Heather Webb
Italian Studies, Yale
The Botanical Affects of Dante’s Comedy
 
Thursday, October 24th @ 5.30 PM
53 Wall St, Room 208
 
Dante’s poetry creates a series of atmospheres and environments that foster and resonate with affective communities. Nonhuman, particularly botanical, bodies delineate and give shape, color and form to these environments in which human forms are visibly subject to the flows of affect that they encounter and in which they are immersed. The overeager tree and the humble reeds on the shore, amongst so many other examples, generate and shape affective atmospheres in Dante’s poem. This lecture suggests some ways that our engagement as readers with the confluence depicted between human and non-human botanical bodies in the Commedia is itself potentially generative
Sponsored by Robert and Suzy Pence
 
Photo credit: Pio De Rose
Admission: 
Free