Teaching The Inferno for modern students

Sorry for not posting last night.  The Internet at Jewell can be very cantankerous sometimes.  But to the main point at hand:  Why teaching The Inferno can be beneficial for our students. 

The Inferno can be an important text for students to take and compare it to their lives and our world around us.  Although it's not for us to say who might end up in which circle of Dante's Hell, there are people either in Hollywood, movies, media, etc. that personify the deadly sins in Dante's epic poem.

This all ties back to the reading comprehension strategy of making connections.  Connections to existential life in schools is obviously frowned upon, but Dante's work can require students to think about their own lives and sins they commit.  Everyone sins, even if you don't want to use the verb sin, there's still wrongdoing happening everywhere by every person at some point.  The poem, although caught up with the question of how to keep yourself from going to Hell and getting into Heaven, can still be beneficial for students to read without a discussion of God, Satan, Heaven, and Hell that could end up offending people.

There are definitely interesting issues to discuss with the text.  One issue is gender.  Are all women, think of Dido or Cleopatra, in Hell there because of sexual deviance?  It certainly seems that way.  What does it say about the patriarchal society of Italy when Dante was writing?  Think about modern conceptions of women.  There is the idea of the virgin and the whore, and many opinions think that women personify the latter. 

Another interesting concept in Dante's work is the idea of responsibility, fate, and free will.  For all of the sinners in Hell, their punishments coincide with their sins.  Think about our punishment for crimes today.  There is not necessarily a correlation between a criminal's punishment and his/her crime.  For instance, in America, if a thief is caught, his/her hand isn't cut off.  But that does happen in other countries.  This could provide for a lively debate (IF DONE CORRECTLY) and could make students really think about our justice system and if it really suffices. 

If you are interested in teaching The Inferno or you want to know more about it from the perspective of a teacher, I strongly suggest you click the following link.  This link takes you to guide of Dante's Inferno by David Bruce.  It's very detailed and thorough.  Inferno Guide: David Bruce.

The next book is The Canterbury Tales.  This is a pretty epic tale as well in terms of literary history as well as content, so be excited!  I hope you enjoyed Dante as much as I do and you delve into his discussion of purgatory and paradise as well.  Dante is a great author in terms of, again, literary history as well as the content he discussed. 

Next will be a discussion of the history and background of Geoffrey Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales.

Until then,

Cassy