Department of Italian Studies presents
The Annual Dante Lecture
Heather Webb (Italian Studies, Yale)
“The Botanical Affects of Dante’s Comedy”
Dante’s poetry creates a series of atmspheres 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 flow sof affect that they encounter and in which they are immersed. The overeager free and the humble reeds on the shore, amongst so many other examples, generate and shape affective atmospheres in Dante’s poem. This lecture sugests 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.
