Dante The Unorthodox The Aesthetics Of Transgression

During his lifetime, Dante was condemned as corrupt and banned from Florence on pain of death. But in 1329, eight years after his death, he was again viciously condemned—this time as a heretic and false prophet—by Friar Guido Vernani. From Vernani’s inquisitorial viewpoint, the author of the Commedia “seduced” his readers by offering them “a vessel of demonic poison” mixed with poetic fantasies designed to destroy the “healthful truth” of Catholicism. Thanks to such pious vituperations, a sulphurous fume of unorthodoxy has persistently clung to the mantle of Dante’s poetic fame. The primary critical purpose of Dante & the Unorthodox is to examine the aesthetic impulses behind the theological and political reasons for Dante’s allegory of mid-life divergence from the papally prescribed “way of salvation.” Marking the septicentennial of his exile, the book’s eighteen critical essays, three excerpts from an allegorical drama, and a portfolio of fourteen contemporary artworks address the issue of the poet’s conflicted relation to orthodoxy. By bringing the unorthodox out of the realm of “secret things,” by uncensoring them at every turn, Dante dared to oppose the censorious regime of Latin Christianity with a transgressive zeal more threatening to papal authority than the demonic hostility feared by Friar Vernani.

In Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke combines literary-critical analysis with philosophical and theological reflection to cast new light on Dante's poetic vision. Conversely, Dante's medieval masterpiece becomes our guide to rethinking some of the most pressing issues of contemporary theory. Beyond suggestive archetypes like Adam and Ulysses that hint at an obsession with transgression beneath Dante's overt suppression of it, there is another and a prior sense in which transgression emerges as Dante's essential and ultimate gesture. His work as a poet culminates in the Paradiso in a transcendence of language towards a purely ineffable, mystical experience beyond verbal expression. Yet Dante conveys this experience, nevertheless, in and through language and specifically through the transgression of language, violating its normally representational and referential functions. Paradiso's dramatic sky-scapes and unparalleled textual performances stage a deconstruction of the sign that is analyzed philosophically in the light of Blanchot, Levinas, Derrida, Barthes, and Bataille, as transgressing and transfiguring the very sense of sense.

Dante and Heterodoxy: The Temptations of 13th Century Radical Thought, edited and with an introduction by Maria Luisa Ardizzone, collects several studies devoted to discussing Dante’s work in the light of the intellectual debate that developed in thirteenth century Europe after the entrance of new Aristotelian learning and the diffusion of Greek-Arabic thought, in particular the Latin translations of works by Ibn Rushd (Averroes). What takes form in the various articles is the emerging of an interest in the philosophical and scientific contents of Dante’s opus. Heterodoxy in this volume is thus linked to, but not always coincident with, what medieval scholars such as Ferdinand Van Steenberghen or Alain De Libera term “radical Aristotelianism” or “Integral Aristotelianism”. The word “temptations”, as its meaning clearly shows, delineates not an organic link with heterodox or radical ideas, but rather an intermittent inclination to include or evaluate themes related to these ideas. “Temptations” implies a search, an interrogation that consists of the doubts and uncertainties of a poet strongly involved in the intellectual debate of his time and culture, and for whom philosophy and theology are not fields of opposition but different modes of inquiry.

Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman' potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Christopher Ryan's study of Dante and Aquinas, touching on issues of nature and grace, of explicit and implicit faith, and of desire and destiny, is intended to mark the difference between them in key areas of theological sensibility. Re-shaped and revised by John Took on the basis of papers made available to him from Christopher Ryan's estate, it seeks to deepen our understanding of one of the great cultural encounters in European letters.

This work brings together three authors who have written movingly about mourning : Dante Alighieri, Francesco Petrarca, and Marcel Proust. Jennifer Rushworth explores how each of them, through their respective narratives of bereavement, grapples with the challenge of how to write adequately about the deeply personal and painful experience of grief.

"For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his exile in 1302. Beginning with the often violent circumstances of Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of what he himself speaks of as "maturity in the flame of love." The result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work." --Amazon.com.