Dialogues in Performance: a Team-Taught Course on the Afterlife in the Classical and Italian Traditions

Angela Gosetti-Murrayjohn (University of Mary Washington)
and Federico Schneider (University of Mary Washington)

In canto 26 of the Inferno, Dante and Vergil explore the eighth pouch of Malebolge, wherein dwell fraudulent counselors clothed in fire, and there the souls of Ulysses and Diomedes "e cosi insieme a la vendetta vanno come a l'ira" (56-7) approach within a single flame which Dante likens to the pyre of Eteocles and his brother (53-4).  For the first time in the Inferno, Vergil, owing to the likelihood that the Greeks will disdain Dante's speech (73-75), intercedes and asks Dante to remain silent (72) while he, il maestro, interviews the flaming souls to gather the intelligence which Dante wishes to glean from them.

This passage is remarkably metaliterary for many reasons, not least because here we have represented three characters, Dante, Vergil, and Ulysses, who either feature or are featured in katabases of magna opera.  Vergil, whose "arma virumque" essentialized the Odyssey and the Iliad, functions as an intermediary between Dante, who must remain silent in the presence of the Homeric heroes, and Homer, represented by essentialized references to the Odyssey and to the tenth book of the Iliad.  Irregardless of whether or not Dante had direct access to Homer, what this passage seems to suggest is that Homer is presnt in Dante's text through Dante's literary and metaliterary conversations with Vergil.

With its explicit and, most importantly, implicit dialogues taking place between Dante, Vergil and Homer, canto 26 provides the perfect metaphor for a course aimed at a comparative analysis of the Classic and Italian literary traditions.  Moreover, with its emphasis on the dramatization of dialogues, this canto is also an inspiring model for how interpretation of texts that are in dialogue with one another may in turn be achieved in a dialogic fashion.  Thus, dialogue in performance has become the manifesto of a team-taught course, which is comparative in content and performative in style and which aims at teaching how to engage in meaningful, comparative conversations about literature.  By means of a series of sample comparative dialogues performed in class by faculty from two disciplines, students learn first hand how and why to engage in interdisciplinary conversations about core texts in the Classical Tradition.

This co-taught course offers innovative variations on standard team-teaching models (J. R. Davis, 1995. Interdisciplinary Courses and Team Teaching. West Port, CT.), and is currently being offered for the first time.  This co-presented paper will assess what we did, why we did it, and what we--and our students--have learned in the process.