Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy: Volume 2 (original) (raw)
Sursum Ductio. Reasoning Upward. An Investigation into the Vertical Structure of Dante's Commedia
2021
This dissertation investigates “vertical readings” of the Commedia, i.e., the interpretive method that compares and contrasts same-numbered cantos in the three canticles of the poem: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Although there is a consensus that specific vertical readings are intentional, critics remain skeptical of extrapolating it into a totalizing system. This dissertation aims to delineate the methodology’s parameters, trace its emergence in the field of Dante studies, and anchor it within the context of Italian Duecento and Trecento culture. This research investigates the methodology by gathering vertical readings in Dante studies into a comprehensive archive. This catalog provides valuable information regarding the history and emergence of the method and its practitioners’ different theoretical bases.
The Dore Illustrations for Dante ’ s Divine Comedy . 136 Plates
2013
Candid revelations of the tragic castration of theologian Abelard and the subsequent separation of the secretly married fornicators. Heloise emerges as the far more admirable, authentic and unconventional of the two. Abelard seems constitutionally incapable of recognizing, sympathizing understanding her professed suffering, her sexual frustration, her desire for a love relationship which is constant as it was before the mutilation even without the possibility of consummation, her sense of hypocrisy of entering the convent only to obey his wishes rather than any true vocation and her complaint against God for judging them so very harshly. Abelard does his best to theologize her out of these sentiments when (it would appear to me) he could move a mountain with a feather simply by commiserating with her in an honest manner, acknowledging her genuine sentiments even if he does not personally share them. His ego (albeit objectively humiliated) gets in the way of this Christian and humane...
"LE TRE CORONE" , 2020
When we consider its macrotextual solidity, it is easy to forget that Dante’s Comedy was initially conceived as a “trilogy” of cantiche, and was never published in its entirety by its author. Delving into the problem of the Comedy’s composition and early circulation, as suggested by the extant documentary evidence and related chronological issues, the article attempts to sum up recent proposals on these questions. Attention is paid both to internal historical references or allusions and various types of external evidence for establishing the chronology of the first two cantiche.
Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy: Volume 2, 2016
We owe a particular debt to the wonderful community of students, academics and members of the public in Cambridge who have supported the lecture series, 'Cambridge Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy' (2012-2016). We are also grateful to those who, following the series online, have contributed to this scholarly endeavour and experiment. The project has benefited from broad collaboration from the outset. Each public lecture was preceded by a video-conferenced workshop between the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Notre Dame on one of the three cantos in the vertical reading. There are many people who have helped us during the different stages of the project. We are deeply grateful to you all and we regret that, in these brief acknowledgements, we can only thank some of you by name.
J Hede: Ranking Types of Reading: Descriptive and Epic Readings in Dante Studies
In literary hermeneutics it is often maintained that whenever we argue in favour of an interpretation of a literary text, we cannot show that it is the true or correct one, and that every other interpretation is false or incorrect. This distinction is held to be untenable because literary interpretation is infected with semantic indeterminacy and based on a type of reasoning that does not permit precision and exactitude. But this does not mean that we cannot distinguish between good and bad readings or better and worse readings. Although we cannot prove a reading to be the correct one, we can render it probable that it is better than other readings. However, this is no easy task. It is difficult enough to compare only two readings and show that one of them is better than the other because there are many criteria for ranking two competing readings. Therefore it is much more difficult to show that one reading is better than all other readings. But we can use a typological approach to decide between different readings and classify the various readings into different types of reading. On this basis, we can show that one particular reading of a literary text is better in its approach to the thematic content than other types of reading. It is logistically easier to demonstrate the superiority of one type of reading over another type than to demonstrate the superiority of one particular reading over other particular readings.
Dante's ‘Divine Comedy’ was the subject of vivid illustrations from its earliest circulation and, when book making transitioned into the new medium of print in the late 1400s, it became the source of inspiration for new visual traditions. Seeking to see some of these early printed Dantes in more detail and to explore the meanings these books may still hold for us today, two University of Oxford specialists in Dante Studies and Book History, Rebecca Bowen and Simon Gilson, invited the artist and printmaker Wuon Gean-Ho to examine and respond to Renaissance editions of the Commedia held in the special collections of the University of Oxford’s Taylor Institution Library. The result is a body of work called ‘Looking for Dante’, a collection of artwork, film, and essays that explores universal themes in Dante’s text and considers their relevance today. Moving from morality and condemnation through love and redemption, ‘Looking for Dante’ offers a modern reading of the ‘Divine Comedy’ and the historical books that preserve it, reflecting on the universal appeal of ink on paper. Access the full, open-access publication here: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:43ea410b-2e64-4c81-8a97-5348d8c004d6/files/s3484zj61t
Bertelli_Dante Alighieri's Comedy.pdf
The paper aims at investigating the manuscript tradition of Dante’s Comedy until the early printed editions. After a brief overview of different typologies of the most ancient manuscript tradition (14th century, first half), the analysis will focus on some famous copyists of the Comedy (e.g. Francesco di ser Nardo da Barberino, the ‘copyist of Parm’), then, it will investigate the main codicological features that identify some of the most important codices of Dante’s masterpiece.
Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, second edition: Materials
Approaches to Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy, second edition, 2020
For those numerous courses taught in En glish we highly recommend duallanguage editions for the fa cil i ty they offer those instructors who wish to note certain aspects of the Italian text. In par tic u lar, we would note the translations with commentary by Allen Mandelbaum; Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander; and Robert Durling and Ronald L. Martinez; as well as those by Robin Kirkpatrick and Stanley Lombardo for their readability, valuable notes, and sometimes extended commentary on points of interest. We recognize the appeal that some earlier versions have for many instructors (e.g., those by Mark Musa, John D. Sinclair, Charles S. Singleton, John Ciardi, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow). We also would note that, among the many recent translations, those by Robert Pinsky, Anthony Esolen, Clive James, and Mary Jo Bang have been used to good effect by instructors. Madison Sowell's essay on evaluating En glish versions of the Comedy discusses the vari ous ele ments involved in choosing translations for a course on Dante. Readings from Dante's minor works are also used profitably in many courses. At times, the entire Vita nuova is assigned and relevant sections of the Monarchia, the Letter to Can Grande, Convivio, and De vulgari eloquentia are incorporated to provide background material for the study of the Comedy or to highlight their intrinsic importance in the more general medieval context. John Took provides a fine overview of these writings in Dante: Lyric Poet and Phi loso pher. Therefore, in addition to the editions and versions of the Comedy noted above, we call attention to several recent En glish translations of Dante's minor works that are impor tant additions to class syllabi. The most frequently used text in classes is the Vita nuova, often read in its entirety, and instructors should note the debate concerning its division and presen ta tion, even though these considerations do not affect its meaning vis-à-vis the Comedy. 2 Generally, earlier En glish translations of the Vita Nuova-those of Musa and Barbara Reynolds-still enjoy great popularity, although the more recent versions by Anthony Robert Mortimer and by Andrew Frisardi have received favorable comments. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's nineteenth-century version is also available in a 2002 edition. Small but representative se lections from the other minor works often find their way into course syllabi and can be impor tant additions. For investigations of Dante's views on language and lyric poetry, readings from De vulgari eloquentia are very impor tant, and two translations have recently appeared by Marianne Shapiro and Steven Botterill, respectively. Similarly, for Dante's ideas about the proper relationship between church and state, the Monarchia is the crucial document, and some recent translations include those by Richard Kay and by Shaw, although for classroom purposes the latter is more manageable.
A World to See the Comedy by: Tom Phillips's Transmediations of Dante
Bibliotheca Dantesca, 2022
Between 1976 and 1989, the production of British visual artist Tom Phillips (b. 1937) found its main source of inspiration in Dante and particularly in his Inferno. This article aims to provide a new approach to the question that drives, directly or indirectly, most of the scholarship on Phillips’s reception of Dante: how can we best describe the relation between the text of the Com-edy and the images by Phillips that accompany it? Rather than relying on no-tions such as “adaptation” and “illustration”—which might prove inadequate to account for the text-image relations in Phillips’s works—I would propose to interpret Phillips’s reception of Dante as an attempt to create “a world to see the Comedy by.” More specifically, the analyses that follow will have four objectives. First, I will provide an overview of the transmediation strategies deployed by Phillips across his Dante-related projects. Second, I will attempt to explain the system of relations that shapes Phillips’s Dante-inspired visual world and to show, more in general, how this world ‘works’ by drawing on Georges Poulet’s phenomenology of reading and Stanley Fish’s reader-re-sponse theory. Third, I will argue that Dante’s Inferno should not be seen as an illustrated book but rather as a livre d’artiste in which Phillips transmediates his aesthetic experience of the Inferno into a visual world whose unique iconography needs, in turn, to be explained to the reader-viewer in the form of a commentary. Fourth, I will show how Phillips’s Dantesque visual world and, more in general, Phillips’s very identity as an artist depend on his identification with Dante himself—or, rather, on his ‘absorption’ of certain traits of Dante’s otherworldly journey into the conceptualization of his own life journey.
Neophilologus, 1999
This article examines Dante's use of mirror imagery in the Comedy by investigating precedents in literary, scientific, philosophical and theological writings for his own mirror comparisons and metaphors in Purgatorio and Paradiso. It shows that Dante draws on several specific traditions for his imagery and considers how he transforms these borrowings in order to fulfill his own imaginative and structural designs in his poetry. After an examination of the precedents for Dante's poetic treatment of mirrors with reference to planets, eyes, angels, and God, the article concludes with an analysis of his reworking, in the Paradiso, of St Paul's celebrated mirror metaphor in I Corinthians 13:12. It is argued that this Pauline text provides a structuring principle for Dante-personaggio's own visual experiences in the final cantica before his more direct perceptions of the deity in the final canto of the poem.
Readership, Reading and Readers in Dante's Works
ISCAD Annotated Bibliographies, 2019
identify nineteen to twenty-one passages in the Commedia in which Dante interrupts his narrative with a few lines beginning "lettor", "tu che leggi", or a similar vocative. Lanci (1970) offers the following summary of the explicit addresses. See:
Textual Physiognomy: A New Theory and Brief History of Dantean Portraiture
Published in California Italian Studies, 6.1 (2016): 1-34. Weblink: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2519f0xw Dante Alighieri, as we understand him and read his poetry, is a construct crafted from posthumous portraiture. Dante's famous profile appears at a pivotal transition point from icon to image, where the aura of saint is transferred to the poet. In this aesthetic creation of identity, portraits and visual representations of Dante are influenced by, and in turn influence, commentaries, translations, and biographies of the poet. This visual and textual synergy is called textual physiognomy, and it reaches an important juncture point in the 19th century, when Dante Gabriel Rossetti--as both artist, critic and translator of Dante--creates a new and influential alternative to the traditional Dantean identity. Rossetti challenges the Dante the 19th century had taken for granted as fact: the divine "poet saturnine," with "hatchet" profile, aquiline nose, austere face, and laurel crown. Through his iconoclastic approach to the Dantean portraiture tradition, Rossetti gives Dante a new life by emphasizing the human Dante, the pre-exile Dante before the Divine Comedy.