Dante, American-Style: Seymour Chwast’s Graphic Adaptations of the Divine Comedy and European Literature

IF 0.2 3区 文学 0 LANGUAGE & LINGUISTICS NEOPHILOLOGUS Pub Date : 2024-02-24 DOI:10.1007/s11061-024-09802-2
Guylian Nemegeer, Mara Santi
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Abstract

In 2010, the American graphic designer Seymour Chwast (New York, °1931) published Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation, which condenses Dante’s masterpiece into 127 pages. Previous scholarship has mainly focused on how Chwast adapts the Comedy and the specific passages he chooses to include. Chwast has been viewed as just one of many interpreters within a long tradition of Dante adaptations. However, we argue that Chwast possibly introduces a new chapter in this tradition. Specifically, he diverges from two types of Dante illustrators. Firstly, he surpasses illustrators who subordinate their work to Dante’s literary text and who simply depict images and characters from the book to visually represent and explain the text. Secondly, he deviates from artists who engage with Dante as equals, creating a work of art with double authorship, e.g., Gustave Doré. Chwast moves beyond Dante and engages primarily with American pop culture, particularly its cinematic tradition and comic books, rather than with Dante. The same process can be observed in Chwast’s other literary adaptations. Hence, in this paper, we mainly focus on Chwast’s adaptation of the Divine Comedy within the artist’s broader Americanisation of European literature. The key aspect of this process is Chwast’s cultural appropriation, wherein the literary sources disappear to make room for 20th-century American pop culture. As a result, the significance of the relation with the sources diminishes in comparison to Chwast’s main goal of representing European literature from his own American viewpoint and appealing to an American readership.

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但丁,美国风格:西摩-丘瓦斯特对《神曲》和欧洲文学的图画改编
2010 年,美国平面设计师西摩-奇瓦斯特(Seymour Chwast,1931 年生于纽约)出版了但丁的《神曲》:该书将但丁的名著浓缩为 127 页。以往的学术研究主要集中在 Chwast 如何改编《神曲》以及他选择纳入其中的具体段落。克瓦斯特一直被视为但丁改编作品悠久传统中的众多诠释者之一。然而,我们认为,丘瓦斯特可能为这一传统带来了新的篇章。具体来说,他与两类但丁插图画家不同。首先,他超越了那些将自己的作品从属于但丁的文学文本,仅仅描绘书中的形象和人物来直观地表现和解释文本的插图画家。其次,他超越了那些与但丁平等合作的艺术家,创造出具有双重作者身份的艺术作品,如古斯塔夫-多雷(Gustave Doré)。克瓦斯特超越但丁,主要接触美国流行文化,特别是其电影传统和漫画书,而不是但丁。在奇瓦斯特的其他文学改编作品中也可以看到同样的过程。因此,在本文中,我们主要关注的是奇瓦斯特对《神曲》的改编,以及艺术家对欧洲文学更广泛的美国化。这一过程的关键在于丘瓦斯特的文化挪用,即文学来源消失,为 20 世纪的美国流行文化腾出空间。因此,与丘瓦斯特从自己的美国视角来表现欧洲文学并吸引美国读者这一主要目标相比,与文学来源的关系的重要性就大打折扣了。
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来源期刊
NEOPHILOLOGUS
NEOPHILOLOGUS Multiple-
CiteScore
0.50
自引率
0.00%
发文量
29
期刊介绍: Neophilologus is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of modern and medieval language and literature, including literary theory, comparative literature, philology and textual criticism. The languages of publication are English, French, German and Spanish.
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