What better way to begin a course on the Afterlife than to start with the corpse.
The reading assignments for our first real day of discussion were Iliad 17 (the battle over Patroclus’ corpse) and Purgatorio 5 (especially Buonconte Montefeltro). In both of these texts, unburied corpses are threatened with disfigurement and function as symbological objects of contestation. This was our point of contact between these texts, and from there, we attempted to flush out the specific contexts in which the contestation in each of these texts emerges.
We began with our dialogic prompts, and these were fairly general in nature, serving as frames for what we hoped would be sustained, comparative inquiry. Although we made some progress in that regard, we were both surprised to encounter a virtual barrage of comments and questions from students, some of which were really off-track (that is, off our carefully constructed notion of what the track should and could be). Of course, we were delighted at the students’ enthusiasm; and some of the questions and comments were quite sophisticated, leading us exactly where we wanted to go–nostalgia for the body, the spiritual symbiosis of the living and the dead, and the ethics of suffering, to name a few micro-themes.
It quickly became clear to us, however, that incorporating other voices into our dialogue is going to be very challenging. In any discussion course, fielding and responding constructively to comments and questions is, at the very least, an idiosyncratic art. Given the parameters of what we are trying to do, which is complicated enough, directing student questions and comments is going to involve some behind-the-scenes negotiation on our part. Which leads me to wonder, will other voices serve as a matrix for contestation or symbiosis? I sincerely hope the latter.
