“Mind over Affect: Some Thoughts on Dante and Emotions” Prof. Zygmunt G. Baranski (Cambridge, UK/Notre Dame, USA)

Date: Wednesday 22 October
Time: 6:30pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (Geography & Geology Building), University of Western Australia

The study of the emotions has become increasingly central to medieval studies. The lecture begins by discussing the unsystematic contribution that Dante scholarship has made to the question since the early twentieth century, and addresses some questions of method relating to the analysis of the poet’s engagement with contemporary ideas on the ties between reason and passion. It will then focus on two areas – one ideological, the nature of heavenly beatitude, the other poetic and rhetorical, the poet’s addresses to the reader in the Commedia – in which Dante’s representation of the interplay between the intellect and the emotions effectively illustrates his thinking on each, as well as their interconnections.

Zygmunt G. Barański is Serena Professor of Italian Emeritus at the University of Cambridge and Notre Dame Chair of Dante & Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame. He has published extensively on Dante and on medieval and modern Italian literature and culture, and is currently completing a book on Dante’s intellectual formation. For many years he was senior editor of The Italianist, and currently holds the same position with Le tre corone.