ITAL 3. 10 Lecture 6. Chapter 1. Canto XII XVI The Middle Ground and Its Presiding Figures 0. Professor Giuseppe Mazzotta With Canto XII from Canto XII to Canto XVI we are still in what is known the middle ground, which is a moral ground the middle ground of Hell. We are between the area of incontinence, that we saw in the last few weeks and the area of malice this middle ground, which is a ground of violence or bestiality, as it is also called. What I want to draw your attention to first of all is the fact that Dantes presiding symbols, the presiding figures in this area are all figures hybrid figures, figures of doubleness the Minotaur and the Centaurs in Canto XII. You have the Harpies, the filthy, foul figures, monsters with the face of women devouring the foliage and the trees in Canto XIII. And then, this will go on with other emblems of, again, monsters and the figure of but thats the figure of fraud. I dont want to get into that. Lecture 4 Inferno V, VI, VII Overview. This lecture examines Inferno IV VII. Dantes Limbo, modeled on the classical locus amoenus, is identified as a place of. Lecture Unit 2 Yongii Cho, Successful Home Cell Groups by David Kueker www. disciplewalk. com Major League Disciple Making A Guided Tour of the Best Research on the. Peter Friz and Martin Hairer A Course on Rough Paths With an introduction to regularity structures June 2014 Errata last update April 2015 Springer. Automatically cite an EBook or PDF in APA, Chicago, Harvard, or MLA style format. Instant and freeFigures of again, Minotaurs and Centaurs in XV. What is the importance of these figures There are neo Platonic images figures of Centaurs, Minotaurs understood to signify the doubleness of human beings. The capacity of human beings to join within themselves both the human and the bestial, or the animal experiences, possibilities of being. In neo Platonic thinking, especially in the twelfth century, to give you the historical ring to it, we are saying the twelfth century, the so called Chartrians, and more so in the fifteenth century Florence, with Pico, the figures the whole idea is that human beings are really a kind of copular or neutral entities capable of   who have the potential of this doubleness within them. Theyre capable of becoming fully rational or descending into bestiality. The Disneyowned publisher Hyperion paid 6. 7 million for the rights to publish a book about Pausch called The Last Lecture, coauthored by Pausch and Wall Street. The position in the ladder of being is one of utter indeterminacy. In the twelfth century, this is not the case. They still believe in these images. They are fixed images of entities, creatures capable of being, at the same time, expressing these dual impulses, the bestial and the human impulse. This is Dante seems to be quite aware that somehow that these symbols do not completely characterize what human beings really are, that the ability of human beings to redeem themselves, to free themselves out of a certain state or fall, plunge, into the opposite state. Theres a difference between the symbols and what human beings are going to be able to do. This is really the these are why I focused on canto I asked you to read Canto XII, where Dante places tyrants. Its really an anonymous canto. There are no great figures, no great personalities. We do know, and Dante gives a list of all the tyrants of his time and the tyrants Dionysius of Syracuse, Alexander, the Ezzolino of his own time, in Padua, etc. They are figures of tyranny, but at the same time he places next to them figures of educators, figures of teachers, such as, for instance, Chiron. And this is a little bit ironic, because he says, come straight after Dantes exemplary representation of Virgils own teaching in Canto XI. You remember when Virgil goes on explaining in great detail the shape of Inferno. Here now, once again Dante takes the other perspective, that which he takes to be the tyranny of teaching. That is to say, a sort of teaching does not allow that freedom, that the very symbols, the very presiding figures of this canto, also seem to deny. They are forever man and beast. And Dante claims, clearly, that there is a teaching that has to allow the sort of the freedom to move, either in the direction of rationality or the freedom, or the choice, to move in its opposite direction. AP Photo. Randy Pausch passed away this week. This page is a tribute to him and the incredible legacy he left behind for all the world to ponder. Welcome to our Fall website update This is another huge one and has literally taken until the very last minute to get it all completed We start with an important. Third edition by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig. The leading textbook in Artificial Intelligence. Used in over 1300 universities in over 110 countries. This is the substance, I think, of Canto XII. Chapter 2. Canto XIII The Suicides 0. We come, though, to Canto XIII which is one of the most remarkable cantos of Inferno, its the canto of the suicides, and Dante encounters here a figure a poet, a very well known poet, a very well known figure of maybe the late the middle part of the thirteenth century called Pier delle Vigne. And as you read through the canto, you will see that he puns on both terms of the name. Peter and he thinks of himself as a figure of Peter, one who holds the keys, the two keys of the kingdom, the keys of power, but also the last name Pier delle Vigne, meaning of the vineyard. And this is of course we are going to witness now a metamorphosis of a human being the metamorphosis of a human being, from being human to becoming a vegetable, a plant. This is the story of suicides and we shall see what Dante thinks about suicides. What he why does he think that such an evil as to be condemned in this area of violence against the self We do know that Dante I dont have to go over this but you do know that Dante distinguishes violence against self, violence against others as in Canto XII, violence against nature and violence even against the divinity in Canto IV. Lets look at Canto XIII and a little bit of some textual details and then well discuss some of the issues of the canto. Nessus had not yet reached the other side again when we set out through a wood which was not marked by any path. Here, there seems to be no directions at all, almost as if Dante were revisiting Canto I of Inferno. The same idea of a sense of loss of self and adumbrating what suicide may also be at some level. A loss of some idea of ones own being, some idea of what one is or should be. We are not told anything more but then rather Dante shifts to a description of the natural landscape, the world of nature, the landscape and you as you read you must be struck by how hes highlighting a peculiar style and I want to emphasize this style, this figuration of style. No green leaves, but of dusky hue, a series of antithesis. First of all, a series of antithesis, but also anaphoras, negatives. No smooth bows, but knotted and warped, antithetical but at the same time repetition of this no, anaphoric, no, no. No fruits were there, but poisonous thorns. No breaks so harsh and dense have these savage beasts that hate the tilled lands between Cecina and Corneto. We are in what in a place, in a landscape where this is the style called, there is a technical term for the rhetoric Dante deploys, its called privatio which simply means a privation. Emphasizing, theres nothing positive here but its a way of subtracting from what is missing rather than what is there. That is really a negation, the style of a negation, but at the same time through the antithesis, making us think about how the world might be, no green leaves, but of dusky hue. This is a style of taking away and again taking away from any substantial description of the landscape. No breaks so harsh and dense, etc. Here make their nests, the loathsome Harpies, again hybrid figures, just as we had the Centaur in the previous canto, from the Strophades with dismal presage of future ill they have wide wings and human necks and faces, feet clawed and their great bellies feathered, and they make lamentations on the strange trees. So we are in the world were in the world of negation, a world of monstrosities, and a world of privation. What is happening to human beings here Thats really the question that he seems to be raising, but let me just proceed even more carefully here. The whole scene recasts an important scene in Book III of the Aeneid.