Asking How and Why to Read Literature: Singleton in Dante Studies Today

Abstract

In 1986, while addressing the legacy of the great Dante scholar Charles Southward Singleton, Giuseppe Mazzotta argued that the fairest way to confront the power of Singleton’s work was to avoid the veneration accorded to the master by his disciples and let oneself be guided by a different, more vital principle—perplexity. Veneration—Mazzotta argues—is indeed violent, because “it freezes the thinking of both the scholar and his epigones, it rigidifies it in fixed formulae and, in effect, destroys it.” Perplexity, on the other hand, “belongs to a different order of ideas and intentions.”1 Far from implying a sort of a priori skepticism, perplexity, from the Latin term per-plectere, means “to interlace,” “to mix together.” In this sense, perplexity is the best way to approach the production of a scholar like Singleton, as it forces us to actively face both our debt to and our distance from his work, while intertwining our perspective with his. For Mazzotta, in other words, to feel perplexities before Singleton’s work