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 Lino Pertile is Harvard College Professor and Carl A. Pescosolido Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures.
Professor Pertile is a renowned scholar on Italian literature, with a particular focus on the medieval and Renaissance periods.
He has also been Director of the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2010-15). His extensive list of publications include Dante in Context (CUP, 2015), The Cambridge History of Italian Literature (CUP, 1996 and 1999), and The New Italian Novel (Edinburgh University Press, 1993).