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This chapter explores medieval exegetical and affective characterizations of the birthplace of Christ. It focuses in particular on evocations of this birthplace as an exposed, liminal location and argues that the radical exposure endured by Christ at the moment of his birth was crucial to medieval understandings of the significance of the Incarnation. But it also points out that its condition of openness is always in a dialectical relationship with its capacity to enclose and protect.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.
The essay investigates the meteorological phenomena represented in Dante Alighieri's Commedia and their interrelation with the subjectivity of the dead in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Examining how the dead weather the afterlife and how the elements affect them, in turn, the essay takes the complex enantiosemy of the word 'weathering' as a conceptual guiding thread for the exploration of dynamics of exposure ('Inferno'), vulnerability ('Purgatorio'), and receptivity ('Paradiso').
Rehabilitation I
(2019)