Dante?s Volume from Alpha to Omega: a Graduate Symposium on the Poet?s Universe

Dante?s Volume from Alpha to Omega: a Graduate Symposium on the Poet?s
Universe
Yale University, March 26-27, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale University)

Call for Papers

On behalf of the Department of Italian Language and Literature, we are pleased
to announce a Graduate Student Symposium on Dante, to be held on March 26-27,
2010 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Dante?s Divine Comedy is a totalizing vision?a work emanating from and
culminating in the poet?s glimpse of a universe ?bound with love in a
single volume.? In the 21st century, the goals of universal digitization and
constant accessibility that mark our information age might seem far removed
from Dante?s vatic rendering of the cosmos, and yet our technological models
of thought might equally be understood as the current form of an encyclopedic
impulse that stretches back to (and well beyond) the 14th century. Dante?s
Volume from Alpha to Omega will explore how the encyclopedism of today can
enrich, inform, or obscure our understanding of Dante?s universe and its
poetic representation.

In the interests of interdisciplinarity, paper topics may consider,
but are not
limited to the following:

-Receptions of Dante: commentary, exegesis, and philology
-Representations of Dante: the visual, acoustic, and cinematic arts
-Dante and the place of language
-Dante and the sciences
-Poetry as knowledge and self-knowledge
-In the shadow of the Comedy: the ?minor? works
-Nature, necessity, and freedom in the Comedy
-The world outside the secretissima camera: social/institutional history in
Dante?s time
-Justice earthly and divine
-Dante and the lyric tradition
-Theology, history, and the politics of exile
-Classical and medieval theories of love
-Ethics and psychology
-Style and rhetoric
-Theological and philosophical debates in the thirteenth century

Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes (approximately 9-10 pages of
double-spaced text) and may be in Italian or in English.

Please submit an anonymous abstract (no longer than 250 words) and, on a
separate page, a cover sheet with the title of your paper, your name,
affiliation, and contact information (including telephone and e-mail address).
Kindly send this information as Microsoft Word file attachment to
yaledantesymposium@gmail.com by November 15, 2009. Further
information will be
available on the events webpage of the Yale Italian Department
http://www.yale.edu/italian/news/index.html as the symposium draws nearer.