You'll recognize this as the course description that appears on the English Department Homepage.

Dante's Comedy. We will read Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, all three parts of Dante's Comedy (or Divine Comedy as it has come to be popularly known), and will also study other texts and cultural objects which will help us to understand this work. I consider the Comedy to be both "important" and fun, and I love to re-encounter it with new groups of readers. It's an exciting piece of narrative; it's the most stunning and extended example I know of a poet putting the right words in the right order; and it's a dizzying display of learning and cultural synthesis. If you like words and if you'd like to encounter the European cultural tradition in both telescopic breadth and microscopic detail, then this is a poem you are likely to love.