“Levi’s Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell: Witnessing and Literature”
Sharon Portnoff, Pomona College Department of Religious Studies
Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man relies heavily on Dante’s Inferno to witness to his eleven-month imprisonment in the death camp Auschwitz. Beyond the more obvious trope of the journey to Hell, these two texts share the larger question: what is the human? This lecture will explore what motivated Levi to witness to his real-life 20th-century hellish experience in the allegorical terms first coined by the great medieval Christian poet.