Skip to main navigation Skip to main content
info(at)avldigital.remove-this.de
Deutsch English
Last searches

Results for *

Displaying results 1 to 20 of 20.

  1. 'Perché mi vinse il lume d'esta stella' : Giovanni Giudici's rewriting of Dante's "Paradiso" for the theatre
    Author: Ardissino, Erminia
    Published: 21.10.2019

    Transforming a text - narrative or poetic - into a play, made of dialogues and organized into scenes, has been one of the most frequent forms of literary transcodification both in the past and in the present. We can find examples of this procedure at... more

     

    Transforming a text - narrative or poetic - into a play, made of dialogues and organized into scenes, has been one of the most frequent forms of literary transcodification both in the past and in the present. We can find examples of this procedure at the very origins of Italian theatre, which indeed began as the rewriting of earlier texts, both in the "sacre rappresentazioni" and in the profane field: the Bible in the first case and the Ovidian mythologies in the second. Poliziano's "Fabula d'Orfeo" and "Cefalo e Procri" by Niccolò da Correggio are the first well-known examples of this process. Thus, the metamorphosis of a text into a dramatization has many models in the history of theatre and literature. It would be of great interest to start with an overview of the different types, aims, and forms of transcodification of texts that are enacted in order to create dramatizations capable of being performed on stage. Erminia Ardissino attempts to offer an introduction to her study of Giovanni Giudici's play about Dante's "Paradiso" with a brief discussion of three different practices of theatrical transcodification. She looks at three pièces written at the request of the Italian scenographer Federico Tiezzi between 1989 and 1990 as stage productions of the three cantiche of the Divine Comedy. Although they belong to the same project, are inspired by the same person, and share a unified aim, the three pièces created by Edoardo Sanguineti, Mario Luzi, and Giovanni Giudici show three different approaches to the task of transcodifying a text in order to produce a drama - the task, in Genette's words, of creating a theatrical palimpsest.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 792; 800; 850
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia. Paradiso; Rezeption; Giudici, Giovanni; Bearbeitung; Theater; Adaption <Literatur>
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  2. Irish Dante : Yeats, Joyce, Beckett
    Author: Boitani, Piero
    Published: 22.10.2019

    'Dante and Ireland', or 'Dante and Irish Writers', is an extremely vast topic, and to cover it a book rather than an essay would be necessary. If the relationship between the poet and Ireland did not begin in the fourteenth century - when Dante... more

     

    'Dante and Ireland', or 'Dante and Irish Writers', is an extremely vast topic, and to cover it a book rather than an essay would be necessary. If the relationship between the poet and Ireland did not begin in the fourteenth century - when Dante himself may have had some knowledge of, and been inspired by, the "Vision of Adamnán", the "Vision of Tungdal", and the "Tractatus de purgatorio Sancti Patricii" - the story certainly had started by the eighteenth, when the Irish man of letters Henry Boyd was the first to produce a complete English translation of the "Comedy", published in 1802. Even if one restricts the field to twentieth-century literature alone, which is the aim in the present piece, the list of authors who are influenced by Dante includes Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, and Heaney - that is to say, four of the major writers not only of Ireland, but of Europe and the entire West. To these should then be added other Irish poets of the first magnitude, such as Louis MacNeice, Ciaran Carson, Eiléan Ní Cuilleanáin, and Thomas Kinsella. Therefore Piero Boitani treats this theme in a somewhat cursory manner, privileging the episodes he considers most relevant and the themes which he thinks form a coherent and intricate pattern of literary history, where every author is not only metamorphosing Dante but also rewriting his predecessor, or predecessors, who had rewritten Dante. Distinct from the English and American Dante of Pound and Eliot, an 'Irish Dante', whom Joyce was to call 'ersed irredent', slowly grows out of this pattern.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 820; 850
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; La vita nuova; Rezeption; Englisch; Literatur; Irland; Yeats, William Butler; Joyce, James; Beckett, Samuel
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  3. Human desire, deadly love : the "Vita Nova" in Gide, Delay, Lacan
    Author: Camilletti, Fabio
    Published: 22.10.2019

    Between 1816 and 1821, the philologist François Raynouard (1761–1836) published a "Choix des poésies originales des troubadours". His connections with Madame de Staël's cultural circle at Coppet determined the construction of the myth of courtly love... more

     

    Between 1816 and 1821, the philologist François Raynouard (1761–1836) published a "Choix des poésies originales des troubadours". His connections with Madame de Staël's cultural circle at Coppet determined the construction of the myth of courtly love as a forerunner of Romantic love. [...] Acording to this cultural tradition, Dante is an intermediate (although pre-eminent) step in the history of Western desire, a process begun in medieval Provence and revitalized by European Romanticism. When Lacan approaches Dante, it is therefore one Dante - this Dante - that he is approaching. The present essay, in which Fabio Camilletti analyses three tightly interwoven texts, explores some of the reverberations of this encounter. In 1958, Lacan published in "Critique" an article entitled 'La jeunesse d'André Gide, ou la lettre et le désir'. This text, later included in Lacan's "Écrits", was meant to be a review of a biography of the young Gide published in 1956 by Jean Delay, entitled "La jeunesse d'André Gide". In comparing Gide's life with his works of youth, Delay notably focused on Gide's novel of 1891, "Les Cahiers d'André Walter", the third text on which Camilletti focuses his inquiry. These three texts evoke in various ways the relationship between Dante and Beatrice, using it as a cultural allusion through which specific problems of sexuality (or, better, of the absence of sexuality) are conveyed. This essay aims therefore to be a study in the rhapsodic and subterranean presence of Dante and the "Vita Nova" between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as well as in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis through the quartet Dante-Gide-Delay-Lacan.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 150; 800; 840; 850
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; La vita nuova; Rezeption; Lacan, Jacques; Gide, André; Delay, Jean; Psychoanalyse
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  4. Transferring Dante : Robert Rauschenberg's thirty-four illustrations for the "Inferno"
    Author: Francini, Antonella
    Published: 23.10.2019

    In December 1960 the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York displayed a series of thirty-four illustrations of the "Inferno" by the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had developed this project over the previous two years, working on it... more

     

    In December 1960 the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York displayed a series of thirty-four illustrations of the "Inferno" by the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg. Rauschenberg had developed this project over the previous two years, working on it almost exclusively, first in New York City, and then in an isolated storage room in Treasure Island, Florida, where he retreated to concentrate on the last half of the cycle. [...] Whatever the spark that set the project in motion, we find Rauschenberg's reply to his detractors here: the refuse that crowded his "Combines" was no joke, nor was it there to undermine or deride high art in the spirit of Dada. With his collection of things, he was composing a new language, turning fragments - the ruins of his environment and culture - into emblems. And what is an emblem if not a composite figure, an assemblage of diverse fragments into a new unity and order? As such, it is an elusive visual allegory whose pictorial image tends to lose its consistency and become a sign open to interpretations; in it, the different narratives springing from its multiple nature come together and give birth to a polysemic language. It is with this language, abstract and referential at the same time, that Rauschenberg translates Dante's poem and makes it new by linking it to something in existence, present in the viewer’s reality of mechanically reproduced images. By choosing 'to ennoble the ordinary', he, perhaps unconsciously, became the hermeneutist of his age and gave durability to what was trivial and precarious.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Rauschenberg, Robert; Adaption <Literatur>; Illustration; Zeichnung; Avantgarde
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  5. Dante as a gay poet
    Author: Gardini, Nicola
    Published: 23.10.2019

    The reception of the "Vita nuova" among contemporary Italian poets is not based on the love theme. The "Vita nuova" provides Italian twentieth-century poets more with a model of autobiographical writing than with an erotic paradigm. What is essential... more

     

    The reception of the "Vita nuova" among contemporary Italian poets is not based on the love theme. The "Vita nuova" provides Italian twentieth-century poets more with a model of autobiographical writing than with an erotic paradigm. What is essential is that the imitation of the "Vita nuova" expresses a clearly polemical anti-Petrarchan poetics - something which, of course, one would have no reason to look for in American poets. The American poet Frank Bidart's idiosyncratic appropriation of the young Dante, as opposed to the Dante-versus-Petrarch-based interpretation of Italian poets, is peculiar but by no means as exceptional in the American panorama as it might at first appear. Other gay American poets also treat Dante as a model: Robert Duncan, J. D. McClatchy, and James Merrill. In this essay Nicola Gardini attempts to explore, however rapidly, the grounds on which Dante may have become so essential for such poets. To be sure, the Dantism of these gay American poets may be viewed as a particular moment of the well-established American interest in Dante which goes as far back as Emerson and Longfellow and had its peak in Pound and Eliot. But Gardini argues that such gay Dantism - which no survey of Dante's twentieth-century influence has yet brought to the fore - is a kind of cultural allegiance stemming originally and specifically from the soil of gay discourses and gender preoccupations. Interestingly, Dante, not Petrarch, also serves as a model for some Italian homosexual poets: Michelangelo, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Giovanni Testori. What, then, is it in the work of a poet like Dante, who confined the sodomites in hell and mostly sang the praises of one woman, that is so compatible with, indeed inspiring for, gay views?

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; La vita nuova; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Duncan, Robert Edward; Erotische Lyrik; Homosexualität
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  6. Re-writing Dante after Freud and the Shoah : Giorgio Pressburger's "Nel regno oscuro"
    Author: Gragnolati, Manuele
    Published: 23.10.2019

    "Nel regno oscuro" is the first part of a planned trilogy inspired by the "Divine Comedy", integrating the Middle European style of Giorgio Pressburger's previous works with the attempt to engage with the first part of Dante's poem. The role of... more

     

    "Nel regno oscuro" is the first part of a planned trilogy inspired by the "Divine Comedy", integrating the Middle European style of Giorgio Pressburger's previous works with the attempt to engage with the first part of Dante's poem. The role of Virgil, Dante's guide in the "Inferno", is taken by Sigmund Freud, and the journey of the melancholic protagonist begins as psychoanalytic therapy to enable him to come to terms with the loss of his father and his twin brother, but soon turns into a journey through the realm of the dead which, like the "Divine Comedy", takes the shape of a series of encounters with the shades of historical figures. Thus Dante's descent to hell metamorphoses into a phantasmagoric voyage to the most intimate and obscure dimensions of the human psyche as well as a journey through the tragic events of history in the twentieth century - and the Shoah in particular. The combination of the personal, the collective, and even the universal is one of the most interesting aspects Pressburger takes from Dante's poem. In the following analysis Manuele Gragnolati explores how both Dante's "Divine Comedy" and Pressburger's "Nel regno oscuro" place personal and collective suffering at the centre of their own narratives and stage writing as a political, ethical, and possibly 'salvific' way to deal with this dual suffering, even as they differ in their concepts of identity and selfhood on the one hand and in their models of history on the other.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Pressburger, Giorgio; Psychoanalyse <Motiv>; Unbewusstes <Motiv>; Judenvernichtung <Motiv>; Geschichte <Motiv>
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  7. 'Hell on a paying basis' : morality, the market, and the movies in Harry Lachman's "Dante's Inferno" (1935)
    Author: Havely, Nick
    Published: 28.10.2019

    The 1935 Fox Films "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of... more

     

    The 1935 Fox Films "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship's boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film's social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later 'infernal' sequences. [...] Spectacular admonition and concern about the ruthless pursuit of wealth are the main features which link this "Inferno" of the thirties to the one that had appeared some six hundred years earlier. Wealth and avarice were, of course, demonstrably serious concerns for Dante: as Peter Armour, for example, has shown, there is a recurrent and pervasive concern with money, its meaning, and its misuse throughout the "Commedia". So it is not surprising that the "Inferno" should also have been appropriated by social critics some hundred years before the 1935 Hollywood fable. [...] Some of the narrative and visual patterns in "Dante's Inferno" imply an uneasy underlying vision of the movie industry and its practices. Other productions, publicity, and journalism of the time reinforce suggestions of such a metafictional approach to movies, morality, and the market in the 1935 "Dante's Inferno".

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 791; 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Adaption <Literatur>; Film; Lachman, Harry; Gesellschaftskritik; Moral
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  8. Reclaiming "Paradiso" : Dante in the poetry of James Merrill and Charles Wright
    Author: Jacoff, Rachel
    Published: 28.10.2019

    The 'fortuna di Dante' among English and American poets of the twentieth century is a rich story that continues on into this millennium with new permutations and undiminished energies. Pound and Eliot canonized Dante for more than one generation of... more

     

    The 'fortuna di Dante' among English and American poets of the twentieth century is a rich story that continues on into this millennium with new permutations and undiminished energies. Pound and Eliot canonized Dante for more than one generation of poets and readers. It was "Purgatorio" rather than "Inferno" that both Pound and Eliot valorized, its charged and affectionate poetic encounters serving as a model for key moments in both their works. [...] Yet it was two American poets, James Merrill and Charles Wright, who focused their attention and delight specifically on the "Paradiso", a much less common predilection for both poets and general readers. [...] Wright says that he writes for the dead; sometimes he seems to write as the dead. It is this premature identification with the dead, even if sporadic, which makes Wright so different from both Dante and Merrill, for whom the afterlife is ultimately an affirmation of life. Both Dante and Merrill make us understand the usefulness of the fiction of the afterlife as a way of staging a dialogue with the dead - which is what much of poetry, perhaps much of life, is about. What all three poets share is a dream of paradise as a site that emboldens the imagination.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia. Paradiso; Rezeption; Merrill, James Ingram; Wright, Charles
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  9. 'Una modesta Divina Commedia' : Dante as anti-model in Cesare Pavese's "La luna e i falò"
    Author: Kay, Tristan
    Published: 28.10.2019

    In a 1949 letter, Cesare Pavese describes with great zeal the genesis of a new work - one he compares, albeit with a certain amount of irony, to Dante's Commedia. [...] This embryonic project would quickly become the novel "La luna e i falò",... more

     

    In a 1949 letter, Cesare Pavese describes with great zeal the genesis of a new work - one he compares, albeit with a certain amount of irony, to Dante's Commedia. [...] This embryonic project would quickly become the novel "La luna e i falò", completed in less than two months and published shortly before Pavese's suicide in 1950. On the surface, there would seem little reason to take seriously the analogy drawn by the author between "La luna" and the "Commedia", for the novel in question contains no explicit references to the medieval poet. Tristan Kay argues in this essay, however, that the presence of Dante in "La luna" is both more pervasive and more significant than has previously been suggested. While critics have noted in passing several narrative and structural parallels between the two texts, which Kay details in Section II, no attempt has been made to consider their wider significance in our understanding of Pavese's novel. What follows is a reading of "La luna" which shows that the "Commedia" functions not simply as a formal model for Pavese, but, more importantly, as an ideological anti-model, in dialogue with which the author articulates his deeply pessimistic understanding of the human condition.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Pavese, Cesare; La luna e i falò
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  10. 'Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!' : allegory and mimesis from Dante's "Comedy" to Pier Paolo Pasolini's "La Divina Mimesis"
    Author: Luglio, Davide
    Published: 29.10.2019

    Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a letter sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that 'la questione di Dante è importantissima'. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two attempts to rewrite the "Commedia": "La... more

     

    Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a letter sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that 'la questione di Dante è importantissima'. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two attempts to rewrite the "Commedia": "La Mortaccia" and "La Divina Mimesis". [...] In 1963 he mentioned "La Divina Mimesis" for the first time. [...] Critics have mostly focused on the work's unfinished condition as a sign of the poetic crisis which Pasolini experienced at the end of his life. Scholarly interpretations of "La Divina Mimesis" can be divided into three main groups: the first strain can be primarily attributed to a 1979 essay by Giorgio Bàrberi Squarotti, four years after the publication of La Divina Mimesis. Bàrberi Squarotti attributes Pasolini's difficulty in completing his rewriting of the "Divine Comedy" to the author's ideology. The work's intermittent irony and its unfinished state are good indicators of the impossibility of recreating Dante's achievement, in particular the Dantean ideology. [...] The second strain of interpretation stresses the work's linguistic dimensions. The period when Pasolini conceives of the project of "La Divina Mimesis" corresponds, according to his repeated declarations, to a time of dramatic change in the Italian linguistic context. [...] Finally, the third type of interpretation locates "La Divina Mimesis" in the theoretical context of Pasolini's final conception of poetry. Here critics stress in particular the difference between the poet's intentions and the final result.[...] These three interpretative strains share the conviction that, in comparison with its model, Pasolini's project ends in failure. It is a failure in at least three senses: on the level of its ideology (not as strong as Dante's), on the level of reality (because of the linguistic standardization of Italian society), and on the level of aesthetics (even though the author pretends that his failure possesses an aesthetic value). This paper would like to question this conclusion: by redefining the object of mimesis and its conditions Davide Luglio tries to understand the reason why the author decided to print his work in a form that at first sight appears ill-defined and fragmentary.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 850
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Pasolini, Pier Paolo; La divina mimesis; Allegorie; Authentizität
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  11. Literary heresy : the Dantesque metamorphosis of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka
    Author: Looney, Dennis
    Published: 29.10.2019

    During the Black Revolution, LeRoi Jones used a radical adaptation of Dante to express a new militant identity, turning himself into a new man with a new name, Amiri Baraka, whose experimental literary project culminated in "The System of Dante's... more

     

    During the Black Revolution, LeRoi Jones used a radical adaptation of Dante to express a new militant identity, turning himself into a new man with a new name, Amiri Baraka, whose experimental literary project culminated in "The System of Dante's Hell" in 1965. Dante’s poem (specifically, John Sinclair's translation) provides a grid for the narrative of Baraka's autobiographical novel; at the same time, the Italian poet's description of hell functions for Baraka as a gloss on many of his own experiences. Whereas for Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, Dante marks a way into the world of European culture, Baraka uses Dante first to measure the growing distance between himself and European literature and then, paradoxically, to separate himself totally from it. Baraka's response to the poet at once confirms and belies Edward Said's claim that Dante's "Divine Comedy" is essentially an imperial text that is foundational to the imperial discipline of comparative literature. That Baraka can found his struggle against imperialist culture, as he sees it, on none other than this specific poem suggests the extent to which it is a richer and more complex text than even Said imagined. To see exactly how Baraka does this, Dennis Looney proposes to read several extended passages from "The System of Dante's Hell" to take stock of its allusiveness to the Italian model. For all the critical attention to Baraka, surprisingly no one has undertaken the necessary work of sorting out his allusions to Dante in any systematic way.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 810
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Baraka, Imamu Amiri; USA; Schwarze; Literatur
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  12. From Giorgio Agamben's Italian category of 'Comedy' to 'Profanation' as the political task of modernity : Ingravallo's soaring descent, or Dante according to Carlo Emilio Gadda
    Author: Marchesini, Manuela
    Published: 29.10.2019

    Manuela Marchesini brings Agamben's ideas to bear on Gadda's "Pasticciaccio" and vice versa. While preserving the specificity of their different fields of operation, this mutual exposure contributes to reframing the Culture War of yore. On the one... more

     

    Manuela Marchesini brings Agamben's ideas to bear on Gadda's "Pasticciaccio" and vice versa. While preserving the specificity of their different fields of operation, this mutual exposure contributes to reframing the Culture War of yore. On the one hand, we have a novel published after World War II with a tortuous gestation and convoluted publication history and reception, written by an author who happened to outlive his creative 'canto del cigno'; on the other, a philosophical and essayistic speculation on contemporary events. The function of Dante's "Comedy" in each author spans from the textual to the allegorical, but rests upon one single crucial common denominator: both Gadda and Agamben take literature seriously. [...] The present essay, part of a larger project unfolding along the same lines, attempts a 'close reading' in the spirit that Edward Said has solicited from the humanities in his lectures at Columbia - or, to put it differently, a tentative 'exercise' of critica in the wake of modern Italian Romance philology and textual criticism from Pasquali through Contini and Debenedetti (a lineage of which Agamben's approach appears to be mindful). [...] Marchesini passes over the general Dantesque infernal allegory of "Pasticciaccio" in order to expand on its final scene. Her thesis is that "Pasticciaccio's" allegorical use of Dante's "Comedy" does not just unravel its interpretive knot. It also points to a utopian overcoming of binarism that concurs with Agamben's reflections. "Pasticciaccio's" closure is neither an epiphany (in the sense of a final celebration of the missing piece that completes the puzzle of the novel), nor does it signal a collapse into ambiguity or irrationality (in the sense that everything is left undecided, wavering between one possibility and its opposite). Gadda maintains his interpellation of wholeness unequivocally throughout the novel.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 850
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Gadda, Carlo Emilio; Quer pasticciaccio brutto de Via Merulana; Agamben, Giorgio
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  13. Dante's "Inferno" and Walter Benjamin's cities : considerations of place, experience, and media
    Author: Merte-Rankin, Angela
    Published: 30.10.2019

    When Walter Benjamin wrote his main texts, the theme of the city as hell was extremely popular. Some of his German contemporaries, such as Brecht or Döblin, also used it. Benjamin was aware of these examples, as well as of examples outside Germany,... more

     

    When Walter Benjamin wrote his main texts, the theme of the city as hell was extremely popular. Some of his German contemporaries, such as Brecht or Döblin, also used it. Benjamin was aware of these examples, as well as of examples outside Germany, including Joyce's "Ulysses" and Baudelaire's "poetry". And he was - at least in some way - familiar with Dante's "Inferno" and used it, and in particular Dante's conception of hell, for his own purposes. Benjamin's appropriation of the topos of the Inferno has been seen as a critique of capitalism and as a general critique of modernism by means of allegory. In the following analysis, Angela Merte-Rankin takes a slightly different approach and, despite Benjamin's status as an expert on allegory, considers hell in its literal sense as a place and examines the issues of implacement that might follow from this standpoint.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 830
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Benjamin, Walter; Hölle <Motiv>; Stadt <Motiv>; Topografie
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  14. Man with Snake : Dante in Derek Jarman's "Edward II"
    Author: Miller, James
    Published: 30.10.2019

    'Perhaps the sodomites should be written out of Dante's "Inferno"', Jarman wrote in his journal on 1 August 1990: 'I'll offer myself as the ghostwriter.' What does he mean by 'ghostwriter' here? How queer is this odd speech-act? What is he offering... more

     

    'Perhaps the sodomites should be written out of Dante's "Inferno"', Jarman wrote in his journal on 1 August 1990: 'I'll offer myself as the ghostwriter.' What does he mean by 'ghostwriter' here? How queer is this odd speech-act? What is he offering to do to the homophobic landscape of the "Inferno", that forbiddingly sealed textual prison, with his Hollywood pitchman's casual bid to 'write out' the sodomites as if they were a slight embarrassment to the divine justice system? Is he speaking in jest as a writer of gay satires and sacrilegious memoirs, or in deadly earnest as an activist who had renounced the middle-class pretensions and frivolities of the pre-AIDS gay world? [...] Jarman counters the trope of homosexual theft visually with the triumphant figure of Man with Snake. The Dantesque merging of snake and thief is replaced by an erotic dance in which the gilded youth raises his phallic partner above his head and seductively kisses it on the mouth. Whereas Dante would have us notice the grotesque parody of the Trinity played out in the seventh bolgia - with the unchanging Puccio as God the Father, the two-natured Agnello-Cianfa as Christ, and the fume-veiled Buoso receiving his forked tongue from the serpent Francesco in a demonic replay of the gift of tongues from the Spirit - Jarman clears away all overdetermined theological meanings to revel in the purely aesthetic impact of the phallic dancer. All the ghosts from Dante's snakepit are conjured away in the film and replaced with the solid presence of a single gorgeously spotlit male body. Ghostwriting Dante, for Jarman, meant more than a mere appropriation of homoerotic scenes from the "Inferno" into his screenplay. It meant a complete reimagining of their aesthetic significance within the filmscape of his Dantean transformations.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 791; 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Adaption <Literatur>; Film; Jarman, Derek; Edward II (Film, 1991); Queer-Theorie; Homosexualität; Kultur
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  15. Dante's 'Strangeness' : the "Commedia" and the late twentieth-century debate on the literary canon
    Author: Pich, Federica
    Published: 30.10.2019

    A reflection on Dante and the literary canon may appear tautological since nowadays his belonging to the canon seems a self-evident matter of fact and an indisputable truth. It is for this very reason, though, that a paradigmatic role has been... more

     

    A reflection on Dante and the literary canon may appear tautological since nowadays his belonging to the canon seems a self-evident matter of fact and an indisputable truth. It is for this very reason, though, that a paradigmatic role has been conferred on Dante in the contemporary debate both by those who consider the canon a stable structure based on inner aesthetic values and by those who see it as a cultural and social construction. For instance, Harold Bloom suggests that 'Dante invented our modern idea of the canonical', and Edward Said, in his reading of Auerbach, seems to imply that Dante provided foundations for what we call literature "tout court". While his influence on other poets never ceased, the story of Dante's explicit canonization through the centuries revolved around the same critical points we are still discussing today: his anti-classical 'strangeness' in language and style, the trouble he occasions in genre hierarchies and distinctions, and the vastness of the philosophical and theological knowledge embraced by the "Commedia" (and, as a consequence, the relationship between literature and other realms of human experience). Dante's canonicity is also evinced by the ceaseless debates that he has inspired and the many cultural tensions of which he is the focus. In the next few pages Federica Pich tries to reflect on the features that make the "Commedia" central both to the arguments of the defenders of the aesthetic approach, such as Bloom and Steiner, and to the political claims of the so-called 'culture of complaint'.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Kanon; Auerbach, Erich; Bloom, Harold
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  16. 'Misi me per l'alto mare aperto' : personality and impersonality in Virginia Woolf's reading of Dante's allegorical language
    Author: Prudente, Teresa
    Published: 30.10.2019

    Although Dante’s influence on modernism has been widely explored and examined from different points of view, the aspects of Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Florentine author have not yet been extensively considered. Woolf's use of Dante is... more

     

    Although Dante’s influence on modernism has been widely explored and examined from different points of view, the aspects of Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Florentine author have not yet been extensively considered. Woolf's use of Dante is certainly less evident and ponderous than that of authors such as T.S. Eliot and James Joyce; nonetheless, this connection should not be disregarded, since Woolf's reading of Dante and her meditations on his work are inextricably fused with her creative process. As Teresa Prudente shows in this essay, Woolf's appreciation of Dante is closely connected to major features of her narrative experimentation, ranging from her conception of the structure and design of the literary work to her reflections concerning the meaning and function of literary language.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 820
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Woolf, Virginia; Erzähltechnik; Sprache
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  17. A cardboard Dante : hell's metropolis revisited
    Author: Rooy, Ronald de
    Published: 30.10.2019

    The subject of this paper is a recent comic movie version of Dante's "Comedy": a 2007 puppet and toy theatre adaptation of the "Inferno" directed by Sean Meredith. It is certainly not the first time that Dante and his theatre of hell appear in this... more

     

    The subject of this paper is a recent comic movie version of Dante's "Comedy": a 2007 puppet and toy theatre adaptation of the "Inferno" directed by Sean Meredith. It is certainly not the first time that Dante and his theatre of hell appear in this kind of environment. Mickey Mouse has followed Dante's footsteps and very recently a weird bunch of prehistoric animals went a similar path: in part three of the blockbuster "Ice Age" (2009), a new, lippy guide character named Buck uses several Dante quotes and the whole strange voyage can be described as a Dantesque descent into dinosaur hell. In the following pages Ronald de Rooy argues that Meredith's version of Dante's "Inferno" is not only funny and entertaining, but that it is also surprisingly innovative if we compare it to other literature and movies which project Dante's hell or parts of it onto the modern metropolis.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 791; 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Adaption <Literatur>; Animationsfilm; Parodie
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  18. 'Per-tras-versioni' dantesche : post-paradisiacal constellations in the poetry of Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto
    Author: Southerden, Francesca
    Published: 04.11.2019

    This paper is a study of language disorders in two works by twentieth-century poets in dialogue with Dante's Paradiso: Vittorio Sereni's "Un posto di vacanza" (1971) and Andrea Zanzotto's 'Oltranza oltraggio' (1968). The constellations that Francesca... more

     

    This paper is a study of language disorders in two works by twentieth-century poets in dialogue with Dante's Paradiso: Vittorio Sereni's "Un posto di vacanza" (1971) and Andrea Zanzotto's 'Oltranza oltraggio' (1968). The constellations that Francesca Southerden focuses on are linguistic, and the specific 'disorder' she wants to consider is aphasia - the dissolution of language. Charting the way in which Sereni and Zanzotto construct the universes of their poems as 'per-tras-versioni' of their Dantean counterpart - something 'turned aside' or 'diverted', which 'cuts across' the ideal, Dantean scheme - she shows how, in different ways, the intertextual dialogue between modern and medieval author manifests itself as a 'resemanticization' of the language of "Paradiso" or, better, of that coming-into-language of desire and the poem which, textually speaking, Dante's third canticle takes as its alpha and omega.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia. Paradiso; Rezeption; Sereni, Vittorio; Zanzotto, Andrea; Aphasie
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  19. 'Il mal seme d'Adamo' : Dante's "Inferno" and the problem of the literary representation of evil in Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus" and Wolfgang Koeppen's "Der Tod in Rom"
    Author: Trabert, Florian
    Published: 04.11.2019

    Even if the title of Wolfgang Koeppen's last novel, "Der Tod in Rom", alludes quite obviously to Thomas Mann's novella, "Der Tod in Venedig", Koeppen's text must be understood first and foremost as a response to Mann's most controversial novel,... more

     

    Even if the title of Wolfgang Koeppen's last novel, "Der Tod in Rom", alludes quite obviously to Thomas Mann's novella, "Der Tod in Venedig", Koeppen's text must be understood first and foremost as a response to Mann's most controversial novel, "Doktor Faustus". The novels of Mann and Koeppen rank among the most well-known literary examinations of National Socialism but stand in a complementary relation to each other. "Doktor Faustus", published in 1947, analyses the cultural and intellectual origins of German fascism, while "Der Tod in Rom", published only seven years later in 1954, criticizes the continuity of National Socialist ideologies in post-war Germany. Both authors focus their analyses of fascism on fictional avant-garde composers who seem at first glance detached from any political context. [...] The actual starting point of Florian Trabert's paper, however, is the fact that both novels are preceded by epigraphs taken from Dante's "Inferno". Trabert begins by commenting on the references to Dante in "Doktor Faustus" and then continues by analysing the allusions to the "Commedia" in Koeppen's novel, which constitute, as Trabert demonstrates, a complex constellation among the three texts.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800; 830
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Mann, Thomas; Doktor Faustus; Koeppen, Wolfgang; Der Tod in Rom; Das Böse
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
  20. Wives and lovers in Dante and Eugenio Montale
    Author: West, Rebecca
    Published: 04.11.2019

    In this brief excursion into the poetry of Dante and Montale, Rebecca West suggests some approaches to only a few issues that emerge out of the creation of both the primary beloveds of Dante and Montale and of those feminine figures that have been... more

     

    In this brief excursion into the poetry of Dante and Montale, Rebecca West suggests some approaches to only a few issues that emerge out of the creation of both the primary beloveds of Dante and Montale and of those feminine figures that have been characterized as ostensibly 'antitranscendental' and more secondary in their roles and meanings. As regards Montale's primary feminine figure, Clizia, West argues that she is, to use Teodolinda Barolini's term for Beatrice, a 'hybrid' poetic character, and ultimately exceeds the limits of the poetic beloved as traditionally conceived and read, not only in the courtly tradition upon which she is modelled but well beyond it. In the case of the so-called secondary 'other women' in Dante's and Montale's poetry, West seeks to show that they are much less separable from the primary feminine figures than such binaries as major/minor, transcendent/erotic, soul/body, and traditional/experimental may lead us to believe. Lastly, West considers specifically the wife-figure, in her conspicuous absence from Dante's corpus and in her late appearance in Montale's. For both poets, there are complex intertwinings, interferences, and non-dualistic patterns that form a densely textured poetic weave, in which both the primary and the secondary feminine figures provide "fili rossi" as well as not so easily graspable dangling threads of meaning. These threads have to do with the preoccupation of both poets with the possible integration of immanence and transcendence, embodiment and abstraction, and with the very limits of poetic language. West's topic is also motivated by a feminist-oriented search for modes of deciphering the figure of the feminine beloved in lyric poetry that are not conditioned exclusively by the traditional emphasis on the male poet-creator, but which allow for a shift in focus onto the female figure who is, of course, the creature of the poet's imagination and skill, but who also often takes him into regions in which the excesses (commonly associated with the female) of non-binary thought and the mysteries of alterity - the feminine symbolic sphere, in short - do not so much allow the emergence of neatly squared-off meanings as the evolution of more oblique, circular conduits of potential significance. As a specialist of modern literature, Rebecca West concentrates on Montale more than on Dante, mainly noting the Dantesque aspects of the former's poetry.

     
    Export to reference management software
    Content information: free
    Source: CompaRe
    Language: English
    Media type: Part of a book; Part of a book
    Format: Online
    ISBN: 978-3-85132-617-8
    DDC Categories: 800
    Collection: ICI Berlin
    Subjects: Dante Alighieri; Divina Commedia; Rezeption; Montale, Eugenio; Frau <Motiv>
    Rights:

    creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.de

    ;

    info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess