PUBLIC TALK: Dante at Auschwitz: the role of poetry in our world
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A public lecture by Lino Pertile, the Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literature, Harvard University.
Is there a degree of suffering and degradation beyond which a man or a woman ceases to be a human being? A point beyond which our spirit dies and only pure physiology survives?
And to what extent, if any, may poetry and literary culture be capable of preserving the integrity of our humanity?
These are some of the questions that this lecture proposes to consider with reference to two places where extreme suffering is inflicted - the fictional hell imagined by Dante in his 'Inferno', and the real hell experienced by Primo Levi at Auschwitz and described in 'If this Is a Man'.
Professor Pertile is a 2016 Institute of Advanced Studies Short Stay Visiting Fellow.
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