How to prepare the Comedy for class:
Read the assigned text straight through, without looking at footnotes.
Read a second time, this time with footnotes and additional notes. Then do any secondary text reading afterward.
Make an outline of the assigned cantos that will force you to be clear about what sin or virtue is being examined, which individuals Dante-Pilgrim is meeting, and what images or metaphors predominate.
Keep track of the correspondences between cantos, as well as among the canticles. Often Dante takes up an issue in a given canto in hell and then reworks it in the same numbered canto of Purgatorio and Durling and Martinez do much of this for you in their “Intercantica” sections following canto notes.
On the micro-level pay attention to the beginning and end of a canto, as well as to its central lines. Dante thinks geometrically and is interested in center and circumference.
Nota Bene: How to cite and refer to the poem in print. (On your papers, put references to the text in parenthesis after quoting, rather than in footnotes.)
Inferno = Inf, Purgatorio = Purg, Paradiso = Par
Examples: Inf 26; Purg 2–25’ “As we read in Inf 5.15,” “Nel mezzo del camin” (Inf. 1.1)
Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso are each called a cantica in Italian or a canticle (in Italian, cantica, sing., cantiche, plural)
Terza rima, the rhyme scheme of the Commedia invented by Dante, is aba bcb cdc ded; each unit (aba, bcb) is called a tercet (Italian terzina, sing., terzine, plural).