“Differing Voices Make Sweet Music”: Unity in Diversity in Dante’s Divine Comedy
27th June, 2021
15:00 – 16:30 BST
Presented by Robert-Louis Abrahamson
Seminar Description
A theme running throughout the three canticles of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) is the importance of community, which for Dante meant bringing together the diversity of individuals into one unified society, all the varieties of humanity conjoined in the Divine Unity. In Hell, Dante depicts the various ways people’s ego-centred actions destroy the possibility of community. Purgatory shows the way we can turn from the ego and purify ourselves in preparation for the experience of the Divine Unity. Heaven, or Paradise, is the place where Dante experiences, and ultimately joins, the life of perfect union while retaining individual identity. The talk will trace the journey through these three regions, focusing on Dante’s poetic (even mythic) rendition of the soul’s relation to these three aspects of Unity in Diversity.
Speaker
Robert-Louis Abrahamson is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Maryland. He studied Scottish literature at Edinburgh University, and has spent much of his career working with mythic literature, mainly from the Western tradition. He has spoken and published on Dante, the American Transcendentalists (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson) and Charles Williams, and on his namesake, Robert Louis Stevenson. In 2017 he gave a presentation on Thoreau at the Chisholme Institute and in 2018 he gave a talk on Edwin Muir for the Beshara Trust. His edition of Stevenson’s Virginibus Puerisque, the first of five volumes of Stevenson’s essays for the Edinburgh University Press’s 40-volume Works of Stevenson, was published in October, 2018.
Booking
Cost: FREE via Zoom
Registration is required via Eventbrite
https://sweet-music.eventbrite.co.uk
