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If there is one thing to be learned from David Foster Wallace, it is that cultural transmission is a tricky game. This was a problem Wallace confronted as a literary professional, a university-based writer during what Mark McGurl has called the Program Era. But it was also a philosophical issue he grappled with on a deep level as he struggled to combat his own loneliness through writing. This fundamental concern with literature as a social, collaborative enterprise has also gained some popularity among scholars of contemporary American literature, particularly McGurl and James English: both critics explore the rules by which prestige or cultural distinction is awarded to authors (English; McGurl). Their approach requires a certain amount of empirical work, since these claims move beyond the individual experience of the text into forms of collective reading and cultural exchange influenced by social class, geographical location, education, ethnicity, and other factors. Yet McGurl and English's groundbreaking work is limited by the very forms of exclusivity they analyze: the protective bubble of creative writing programs in the academy and the elite economy of prestige surrounding literary prizes, respectively. To really study the problem of cultural transmission, we need to look beyond the symbolic markets of prestige to the real market, the site of mass literary consumption, where authors succeed or fail based on their ability to speak to that most diverse and complicated of readerships: the general public. Unless we study what I call the social lives of books, we make the mistake of keeping literature in the same ascetic laboratory that Wallace tried to break out of with his intense authorial focus on popular culture, mass media, and everyday life.
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.
'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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Dante as a gay poet
(2011)
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?
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.
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.