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
Lino Pertile is currently Director of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. A graduate of the University of Padua, he has taught in Italy and Britain before joining Harvard as Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures in 1995. His research has focused on Dante, the Renaissance, and 20th century. He has co-edited The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (1996, paperback, 1999) and published extensively on Dante. His books include La puttana e il gigante: dal Cantico dei Cantici al Paradiso terrestre di Dante (1998), and La punta del disio. Semantica del desiderio nella Commedia (2005).
