"Professor Pertile's lecture, "Songs Beyond Mankind," asks whether there is a degree of suffering and degradation beyond which a man or woman ceases to be a human being, a point beyond which our soul dies and what survives is pure physiology. And, if yes, to what extent may literature be capable of preserving our humanity in the face of unspeakable pain? These are some of the issues that this lecture addresses by considering two systems of suffering, the hells described by Dante in his Inferno and Primo Levi in Survival in Auschwitz."--Publisher's website.