The University of Western Ontario
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

CLC 3335F: Dante's Paradiso

Professor James Miller
Office: UC 351 (Office) or The Pride Library (Weldon Mainfloor)
Phone: ex 85828 (UWO) 519-673-1165 (Home)
E-mail: jmiller@uwo.ca

Course Information

Required Texts
Dante, Paradiso (text, translation, commentary in one vol), ed and trans. Robert Hollander
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy (Penguin classics translation)

Grade Breakdown
Canto Presentation.......................... 10%
Essay.................................................20%
Midterm............................................20%
Final Examination............................50%

Policy on Extensions
If you hand your essay in on the official due date (Nov 13), you'll receive a grade with my written comments. If you hand your essay in on the extended due date (Nov. 20), you will receive a grade without written comments. I will not accept essays after the extended due date without a doctor's note or other appropriate documentation. Note: The Faculty of Arts & Humanities does not permit faculty members to accept written assignments after the last teaching day of the term.

The Dante Cycle
Western's Faculty of Arts offers undergraduates the rare experience of studying Dante's complete works in translation through an intensive cycle of four consecutive half-courses linking CLC with Philosophy. Completed in 1320, Dante's three-part masterwork The Divine Comedy has fascinated, challenged, and inspired readers for centuries – never more so than today. Check out Inferno (CLC 3333 F) for hot tips on where "market forces" are leading us. Tune into Purgatorio (CLC 3334 G) for insider advice on diet, exercise, and sex in a popular "talk-show" format. Then click onto Paradiso (CLC 3335 F) for divine links to the "World Wide Web." Complete the Circle of Life with Dante Philosophus (CLC 4495G) on the poet's intellectual background and philosophical writings.

Course Description

'O Divine Power,' Dante prays at the beginning of his third cantica, 'if you do so lend yourself to me that I may show forth the image of the blessed realm which is imprinted in my mind, you shall see me come to your beloved tree and crown me with those leaves of which the matter and you shall make me worthy.'
Surprisingly, the divine power invoked here is not God or Christ, and the beloved tree is not the Cross or the Tree of Life. Though intending to reveal the mysteries of the Catholic Paradise, Dante boldly invokes the pagan god of poetic inspiration, Apollo, whose beloved tree, the laurel, symbolizes the special immortality bestowed upon the great poet by the Muses.
Paradiso is full of such surprises. Though heaven is commonly thought to be vague, cloudy, remote and even dull, Dante startlingly represents it as an intricate pattern of spectacular sound-and- light shows performed by a multitude of saints whose chief concern (like Dante's) is the state of the world as the Catholic laity experienced it, in all its political turmoil and intellectual unrest, in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.
Students will have the opportunity to mind-link with a series of amazingly telepathic souls: great teachers like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure; great mystics like Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; great rulers like Constantine and Charlemagne; great lover like Cunizza and Rahab; and great tour-guides like Beatrice and St. Bernard.
The entire cantica will be read according to the four-fold method of allegoresis, as Dante himself instructed in his letter to Can Grande. Philosophical insights into Paradise will be offered by the late antique Roman philosopher, Boethius, whose Consolation of Philosophy was an important source for Dante's notion of the intellectual ascent toward perfection.
Students are not required to have a reading knowledge of medieval Tuscan -- though I shall be teaching the Paradiso with the Italian text as well as a modern English prose translation before their eyes. The entire third cantica of the Commedia (33 cantos) will be covered along with such background topics as medieval scholastic theology, cosmology, poetics, ecclesiastical history, and imperial politics

Schedule of Readings

Sept 4 – Canto 1: The Launch

Sept 11 – Canto 2, 3: Moon

Sept 18 – Canto 4, 5, 6: Moon, Mercury

Sept 25 – Canto 7, 8, 9: Mercury, Venus

Oct 2 – Canto 10, 11, 12: Sun

Oct 9 – Canto 13, 14, 15: Sun, Mars

Oct 16 – Canto 16: Mars;
Midterm

Oct 23 – Canto 17, 18, 19: Mars, Jupiter

Oct 30 – Canto 20, 21, 22: Jupiter, Saturn, Stars

Nov 6 – Canto 23, 24, 25: Stars

Nov 13 – Canto 26, 27, 28: Stars, Primum Mobile
Official Due Date –> Essay

Nov 20 – Canto 29, 30, 31: Empyrean
Extended Due Date –> Essay

Nov 27 – Canto 32, 33: Empyrean

Prerequisites: CLC 1020 or permission of the department

Antirequisites: none

Please Note: You are responsible for ensuring that you have successfully completed all course prerequisites (or have special permission from your Dean to waive the prerequisite) and that you have not taken an antirequisite course. If you are not eligible for the course, you may be removed from it at any time, and it will be deleted from your record. In addition, you will receive no adjustment to your fees. These decisions cannot be appealed.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism is a major academic offense (see Scholastic Offense Policy in the Western Academic Calendar). Plagiarism is the inclusion of someone else's verbatim or paraphrased text in one's own written work without immediate reference. Verbatim text must be surrounded by quotation marks or indented if it is longer than four lines. A reference must follow right after borrowed material (usually the author's name and page number). Without immediate reference to borrowed material, a list of sources at the end of a written assignment does not protect a writer against the possible charge of plagiarism. The University of Western Ontario uses a plagiarism-checking site called Turnitin.com.

Absenteeism
Students seeking academic accommodation on medical grounds for any missed tests, exams, participation components and/or assignments must apply to the Academic Counselling office of their home Faculty and provide documentation. Academic accommodation cannot be granted by the instructor or department.
UWO's Policy on Accommodation for Medical Illness (https://studentservices.uwo.ca/secure/index.cfm)
Downloadable Student Medical Certificate (SMC): https://studentservices.uwo.ca under the Medical Documentation heading