La carta veloce: figure, temi e politiche del giornalismo italiano dell’Ottocento

the Euclidian Geometry that Dante draws upon consistently and meticulously throughout the poem. In the case of Music and Astronomy as mathematical arts, the variety of interdisciplinary curricula engagements through ancient and modern Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, and Musicology are myriad, and the silence on such approaches in a reference volume so recently published about teaching Dante is all the more conspicuous. This lacuna most clearly attests to the limitations of the exegetical paradigm established by Dante’s earliest commentators. Ironically, however, the epistemic inertia of this tradition may owe its glacial persistence to the post-Enlightenment zeal for classification and taxonomy that also segregates and compartmentalizes intellectual enterprise. By systemically disarticulating diverse fields of knowledge that are otherwise integrated in Dante’s poetic conception of the human experience in the cosmos, the postEnlightenment epistemologies that dominate modern pedagogy and pragmatically limit the robust development of interdisciplinary systems of learning and teaching have contributed significantly, visa-vis literary scholarship and education, to intellectually marginalizing scientific branches of study integral to the comprehensive reception and exegesis of decidedly multidisciplinary works like Dante’s magnum opus. The essays in this collection express a common commitment to engaging and cultivating communities of learners through the shared experience of teaching and studying the Commedia. Locating the array of these communities in college and high school classrooms, social service agency facilities, and maximum-security prisons, the contributing writers also identify a host of factors—from time constraints to varying degrees of student preparedness—that limit the options available to instructors in designing and teaching their courses. Even where ostensibly more personal applications of elements of contemporary psychology are intrinsic to the contributor’s instructional perspective, as most notably represented in “Dante, Poet of Loss” by Peter S. Hawkins, the shared experience of reading, interrogating, and discussing the poem plays an important role in the pedagogical approach. The volume is, without a doubt, a useful compendium of current hermeneutics and practical strategies for teaching the poem, and, as such, provides an important instrument both for what it includes and for what it excludes in response to Dante’s Commedia.