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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.
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.
Dante's 'Strangeness' : the "Commedia" and the late twentieth-century debate on the literary canon
(2011)
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'.
Zum bürgerlichen Haushalt, weiß man, gehören gute Bücher. Selbstverständlich gehören sie deshalb auch zu dem des Ehepaars Institoris, das in Thomas Manns „Doktor Faustus“ das Exempel bildungsbürgerlichen Niedergangs angibt. Dessen Wohnung, das »Musterbild eines Heims deutschen Kultur-Bürgertums« (440), beschreibt der Roman als bloße Staffage um die politische und psychische Zerrüttung ihrer Bewohner. Die »guten Bücher«, die man bei den Institoris »überall, im Wohn-, Empfangs- und Herrenzimmer, aufgestellt fand« (440), stehen deshalb im Romantext in Anführungszeichen, nicht um sie selbst, sondern um den Bezug ihrer Besitzer zu ihnen als Phrase zu kennzeichnen. »Gut« bedeutet hier den dekorativen Schauwert, so daß auch die Inhaltsangabe auf Möblierung deutet: Es sei »gediegen Bildungsmäßiges« (440). Denkt man an das Bildungsmäßige, das Titel und Motto des Faustus-Romans aufrufen, an Goethes „Faust“ und „Dantes Divina Commedia“, und hält man sich an die »guten Bücher«, die das Lesepublikum dieses Romans aus seiner Vorkriegs-Bürgerlichkeit kennen kann, so ragen zwei Exemplare heraus. Zwei Prachtbände, großformatig die anspruchsvollsten Repräsentationsbedürfnisse befriedigend, zwei bedeutende Werke zu bedeutendem Anlaß neu ediert. Das eine, aus dem Jahr 1932, ist die »100-Jahrausgabe« von Goethes „Faust“, das andere, 1938, eine »Erinnerungsausgabe« von Dantes „Divina Commedia“. (…) Eine »nur aus neun Versen bestehende Anrede des Dichters an sein allegorisches Lied« (219): Es sind ebenso neun Verse von Dante, die Thomas Mann seinem Roman voranstellt. Leverkühns Dante-Vertonung vermittelt so das Motto mit dem Ende des Romans, und alles drei Stellen verbinden sich gegen die zeitgenössisch offiziellen Dante- und Goethe-Monumente zu einem eigenen literarischen Selbstbewußtsein. Es besteht aus der Resignation, ob der mühevolle Sinn verstanden werde, aus dem dagegen behaupteten Vertrauen in den dichterisch-ästhetischen Wert und der daraus gewagten Hoffnung. So erweist sich die »nobilitate«, die das Motto dem Roman zuspricht, als eine gegen das deutschnationale „Faust“- und Dante-Prestige mit eigenem, alternativem Dante- und Goethe-Bezug artikulierte Selbstbehauptung.
„Man kann zu keinem gebildeten Deutschen von Dantes göttlicher Komödie sprechen“, sagt der Romanist Karl Voßler, „ohne ihn an Goethes Faust zu erinnern.“ Und weiter: „Die Zusammenstellung des größten italienischen mit dem größten deutschen Gedicht ist uns seit den Tagen der Romantik zur Gewohnheit geworden und hat ihre Berechtigung: aber nicht so sehr in einer tatsächlichen und quellenmäßig erweisbaren, als in einer inneren und eben darum tieferen Verwandtschaft der beiden Werke.“ (Karl Voßler: Die Göttliche Komödie. 1. Bd. Heidelberg: 1925, S. 1.)
(...) Was den Begriff ‚Weltliteratur’ betrifft, kann die aktuelle Goethe-Philologie indes geltend machen, daß die von Voßler bezeugte monumentale Auslegung weiter von Goethe entfernt ist als das prozessual-kommunikative Verständnis, das die neuere Forschung herausstellt. (...) Im Kompositum ‚Weltgedicht’ sind (...) im Blick auf Goethes Drama beide Singulare unpassend. (...) So wie in diese, Gedicht eine Pluralität von Dichtungen herrscht (...), so ist das Dargestellte nicht mit dem totalisierenden Singular ‚Welt’, sondern besser mit dem Plural zu benennen. Diese Vielfalt auf die Einheit ‚Weltgedicht’ zu bringen ist (...) der Versuch, Goethes „Faust“ Katholizität zuzusprechen. Dieser Versuch ist heute als Wirkungsgeschichte der suggestiven, doch unpassenden Dante-Analogie zu beschreiben und zu beenden.“
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.
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.
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.
Borges : philology as poetry
(2018)
The titles of many of Borges's poems refer to canonical texts of world literature. One poem, for example, deals with the ending of the Odyssey and is simply called "A scholion"; others are called "Inferno V, 129" and "Paradise XXXI, 108", referring both to Dante's "Divine Comedy". These titles indicate that in his poems, Borges often keeps his distance from traditional poetical matters such as love, or, more generally, immediate emotions. Instead, he writes poems that gloss other texts, some of which actually relate love stories. Thus, Borges's poems stage themselves as philological commentaries rather than as poetry in its own right. In a similar vein and on a more general level, Borges likes to present himself in poems, interviews, and essays as a fervent reader of world literature, playing down his role as an original author. [...] In the following two sections of his paper, Joachim Harst tackles this question by commenting on two of Borges's philological poems, namely, the two texts on Dante's "Comedy". A ready objection to the idea of "philological poetry" is that despite Borges's selfstaging as reader, his texts obviously aren't philological in any academic sense. [...] The fundamental role of love for Dante's cosmological vision leads Harst to another understanding of the term "philology," namely, its more or less literal translation as "love of the lógos," the "lógos" being the cosmic principle and the divine word. Dante's Comedy can be considered a "philological" text in the sense that it is fueled by the "love of the lógos," and it discusses this love by citing, glossing and correcting other texts on love. Returning to Borges, Harst suggests that his two "philological" poems on Dante refer to this understanding of "philology." But by modifying the epic's theological underpinnings, they work to integrate Dante into a larger system which Borges calls "universal literature." Harst claims that this notion of literature, just like Dante's cosmos, is also centered on a lógos—albeit differently structured—and in this sense "philological."
"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.