Language

Abstract

Focusing on the stagings of linguistic and personal encounters that emerge in Paradiso, but with the broad context of Dante’s work in mind, this chapter seeks to construct a picture of Dante’s view of language that accounts for a variety of modes of eloquence, from the textual to the emphatically verbal to the depiction of non-verbal communication. The Commedia stages an immense range of encounters and situations in which words and bodies are configured to meet and adapt to the new, performing a plurality of ways of seeing, hearing, reading, and recognizing the individual who speaks, gestures, or otherwise shows themselves as subject. For Dante, this chapter suggests, language communicates and constitutes selves and communities not by virtue of stability but indeed thanks to its ability to constantly transform itself.