From Revelation to Dilation in Dante's Studio (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Cambridge Companion to Allegory, eds. Rita Copeland and Peter Struck, 2010
Since the seminal work of Charles Singleton in the 1950s, the subject of allegory has been at the controversial heart of Dante scholarship. The debate focuses on the Commedia and in particular on the question of whether Dante is there writing an allegory “of theologians,” that is, an imitation of the fourfold model of Scriptural signification, or not. Around this central question several others are arrayed. Is the “letter” of the “holy poem” to be taken as “true” like that of the Bible or as a “beautiful lie”? If the Commedia is modeled on the Bible, does it include all or some of the three allegorical senses (allegorical or Christological; moral or tropological; anagogical or eschatological) attributed to Scripture in the exegetical tradition? Is it more appropriate to talk about the Commedia in terms of allegory per se or rather in those of the typological ordering of God's two books - the Bible and creation as a whole - sub specie aeternitatis , which provides the ontological and epistemological basis out of which the fourfold scheme is developed? Most of what has been written - far more than can be summarized here - has been aimed at determining the Commedia's intrinsic mode of signification and has consistently begged the question of how Dante might have come to displace into the domain of lay vernacular poetry an exegetical practice designed for exclusive application to Holy Scripture, and what might the wider significance of such an extraordinary displacement have been.
The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.
2010
This study begins with the analysis of Primo Levi's reaction to Dante, and the first two chapters deal respectively with Levi's troubled relationship with the monumentality of Dante in Levi's personal culture and with the modern writer's attempts at rejecting that very monumentality. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus is on the inclusion of Dante within Edoardo Sanguineti's poetry, and on the issue of ideologically oriented exploitation of Dante both in Sanguineti's novels and plays and in his critical analyses of the Comedy. The following chapters are about the presence of Dante in Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. In Beckett, a network of Dantean inclusions shows how Dante's presence can be fertile, controversial, and yet apparently discarded. The last chapter discusses Seamus Heaney's Dantisms and especially the question of translation as both a technical and a cultural issue. The result is the perception of a vital Dantean presence, which generates approaches and revalidations in spite of its apparent distance and of its cultural diversity. 2 Dante is often a hidden reference and never an obvious or uncritical occurrence. The choice of authors and of texts depended, also, on a preliminary consideration of the aspect that I considered most likely to produce a fruitful analysis: that is, the controversial nature of the authors' relationship to Dante: it seems to me that wherever the Dantean presence is hidden, misplaced, or even overtly denied, the modern author is in fact making a more interesting statement about his belonging to that very tradition. On the other hand, the text and the plot of the Commedia, and, perhaps surprisingly, even that of Dante's less known works, have journeyed into the imagination of modern men and women and contributed to shaping their artistic production. In this direction, works such as Pasolini's Divina Mimesis 2 , a text that should have become a modern version of Dante's Inferno and that, through its very failure, shows the vitality of Dante's 'plot', the persistence of what Gianfranco Contini called the 'libretto' (or of what we could call the narrative texture of the Commedia and its memorability): 'Il 'libretto', dunque, non tiene piú? Conveniamo che tiene troppo, come un filo che si smaltisce ma non si assimila'. 3 Influence is one of the essences of writing; what appears new in modern texts is a definite focus on ideas such as citation, allusion, evocation and their deliberate inclusion as a conscious, ideological, and often provocative, move 4. The texts we read are in any case, and necessarily, 'encrusted' and much of their fascination depends on the perception of their implied multiplicity.
Bibliotheca Dantesca, 2019
The paper presents the MaTeLDa project (Materiality and Textuality: Editing and Rewriting the Lyric Dante in History, Università degli Studi di Padova, 2018-2020), which offers an interdisciplinary study of how Dante was received and 'canonized' in late medieval and early modern Italy. MaTeLDa envisages the analysis of a selection of Dante's texts in material contexts, and of specific instances of the circulation and reception of his lyric poetry, thereby laying the basis for a better understanding of medieval and early modern authoriality; the qualities of books as 'textual objects'; and the ways in which context, form, and annotation in single books may bestow cultural authority upon authors and works. The essay then investigates a case-study in order to illustrate some key aspects of the circulation of Dante's lyric poetry and the construction of his figure as an Author between the thirteenth and the late fourteenth century: the peculiar case of the transmission of Dante's experimental canzone in three languages (French, Latin, and Italian) "Aï faus ris."
Rime and Reason: Conversion and Vergilian Poetics in Dante's Commedia
Yale-NUS Undergraduate Journal, 2016
This essay discusses how the use of similes and metaphors from Vergil's Aeneid in Dante's Divina Commedia exemplifies both the poetics of conversion and the conversion of poetics, that is, Dante borrows these figures of speech to illustrate how pre-Christian ideas are converted by medieval Catholic thought and to embody Dante's view on the nature and process of conversion. To argue this, I adapt Raymond Williams's terms for cultural analysis in "Marxism and Literature" to analysing the simile of the falling leaves (Inf. 3) and the metaphor of the ancient fire (Purg. 30), and I conclude that Dante exemplifies through his poetic methodology his own belief that the gift of the very best of poets is true imitation of God's method of creation.
Critical Philology and Dante's Commedia. Addenda et corrigenda (july 8th, 2021)
Not only literary students, but also well-known scholars share the idea that the reconstruction of a text is a routine job which leaves little room for creativity. After some 40 years during which I have edited or prepared the edition of works of Machiavelli (Discorso intorno alla nostra lingua), Pietro Aretino (Cortegiana), Torquato Tasso (Aminta) and 17 years devoted to the textual transmission and the text of Dante's Commedia, I think that, except for the first phases of the job, textual editing requires almost constant critical thought and interpretation. I shall present a little series of examples, mostly from Dante's Commedia, with cases ranging from decisions in the realm of accidentals to rather complicated choices among competing substantial readings and to the risky enterprise of emendation against all the witnesses of the work. While these examples can give an idea of the novelty of some solutions of my forthcoming edition (the introduction and Inferno will appear in the first months of 2021), in my view, they seem to confirm the opinion of the great classical philologist Giorgio Pasquali, for whom textual criticism isn't mechanical; it is methodical.