Dante’s Inferno and Seven

By Jasmine Sheibani

Short Research Paper / Creative Final Project: Each student, or team of 2 people, will produce an entry for a class project on Dante as a source of inspiration for works that relate substantially in their structure or content to the Divine Comedy using the digital text platform Manifold. Your project can be

• in written form

• a short--3-page/900 words--paper+bibliography of 2 scholarly sources
• a poem
• a short story
• a script

• an artistic piece
  

• drawing
• painting
• photographic collage
• song
• interpretative dance

• short film
• architectural design, etc.

If you decide to do a creative final project, you will also write a short explanation essay (250-500 words), in which you will explain your project plan and timeline, and share pictures of your project at different stages of completion, documenting each image with a short label. You will also include two scholarly sources (you can include your annotated translation of the Divine Comedy and academic websites). These projects themselves are creative, but are rooted in your background knowledge and critical analysis of Dante's Divine Comedy and the course materials.

If you decide to write a short paper, you are supposed to find and explain in 3 pages/around 1500 words – in the standard 12 pt. font, double-spaced, margins + 2 secondary sources – a citations of and/or reference to Dante and his work in modern or contemporary culture.

These are simply guidelines for the paper assignment to help steer your thinking:
- which example of modern/contemporary reuse of Dante's Divine Comedy did you pick for your paper?
- is it part of a larger work? (i.e. is it a scene from a movie? a chapter from a book? etc.) or does the Dante reuse inform the entire work?
- what was it that sparked your interest in that specific example?
- to which lines/episode/canto/canticle of the Comedy does your example of reuse/manipulation refer? And how closely does it follow the original text?
- did this example of modern/contemporary reuse change your interpretation of Dante's Comedy? Did this assignment change your understanding of the modern work or the modern topic you examined?

See these useful Library research guides: Research Steps Diagram

Actions

 and Handout

Actions

(identifying your topic idea and evaluating resources in Italian Studies).

find and explain an example of citation of and/or reference to Dante and his work in modern or contemporary culture, from post-1800 to today, or of your own creative interpretation. Students will copy and paste an image, or a link, into a shared Google Doc, including citation information (or metadata) as text, and add some of their writing. More instructions will be posted on Canvas Assignments.