NEW Special Slow Reading Pathway – The Ancients Speak to Us: A Slow Reading of Dante’s “Inferno”
(Depicted in image: Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465.)
Pathway duration
34 weeks, January – October 2024
Day and Time
Thursday Evenings
8-9:30 pm EST
7-8:30 Central
6-7:30 Mountain
5-6:30 Pacific
Seminar duration
1.5 Hours
Average Weekly Reading
1 Canto per session
Nature of Course
This course offers a slow-reading, craftsmanlike approach (through conversation, question-and-answer and interpretation) to Dante’s Divine Commedia. The opening portion of each session will be spent examining selected lines from each Canto, in the original Italian. No prior knowledge of Italian is necessary.
Recommended edition:
Mode of Instruction
Purposive conversational reading or dialogue.
Regular Cost: $625 (Registration opens in October) Monthly payment options available!
Current Slow Reading Subscribers: $475
Instructor: Jeff Johnston
On the instructor:
Jeff Johnston is an independent scholar, musician and computer programmer, and a pioneering member of Symposium’s slow reading program (which began with Plato’s Laws). In addition to offering a slow reading of Dante, he offers a year long thematic reading course on “Islamic Poetry and Philosophy of the Abassid Era“ at Symposium. He has also led a slow-reading of Dante’s Paradiso, as well as a year-long slow-reading study of the some of the works al-Farabi. And he is also the leader of the ongoing Shakespeare Sonnets slow reading pathway. Jeff has a B.A. from St. John’s College, and did his graduate work in Political Science at Boston College, concentrating on Medieval thought, with a Master’s Thesis on al-Ghazali.