On Reading Dante's Vita Nuova

This year, the MA Program in the Humanities (MAPH) welcomed its 17th class of master’s students. From its beginning, MAPH has asked its students to become critically aware of the reading practices that characterize scholarly work in the humanities. MAPH’s Core course, Foundations of Interpretive Theory is a rigorous introduction to key texts and reading practices for contemporary humanistic inquiry. In this talk, MAPH faculty director David Wray will give a reading of Dante’s complex, self-referential book of poetry and prose, the Vita Nuova, one of the literary texts the Core course addresses and a fascinating meditation on what it means to write, read, and desire.