Abstract:This article examines Dante's redeployment of Lucan's Bellum civile in the Monarchia and Epistles 5–7, and shows how Dante appropriates Lucan's poem in order to support his philo-imperial agenda. In anchoring his Christian imperial ideal in the historical precedent of ancient Rome, Dante applies Lucan's text to the task of extolling the Roman political past, considered as a continuous historical reality throughout its monarchic, Republican, and Imperial phases. In so doing, Dante both emphasizes philo-Roman elements already implicit in the Bellum civile and quotes Lucanian passages out of context, thus altering or notably twisting their original meaning. Dante glosses over Lucan's denunciation of inter-Roman civil wars and focuses, rather, on the conflicts that ancient Rome fought and won against its external enemies. Moreover, Dante rereads ancient Roman history as governed by Divine Providence and transforms Lucan's pessimistic historical account into a Christian teleological narrative. In the Epistles, Dante claims that true freedom is only possible under a single ruler and implicitly equates the evils of the Roman civil war with the chaos and anarchy of anti-imperial Florence.
{"title":"\"As Lucan Says\": Dante's Reuse of the Bellum Civile in the Monarchia and the Political Epistles","authors":"Bianca Facchini","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2019.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2019.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This article examines Dante's redeployment of Lucan's Bellum civile in the Monarchia and Epistles 5–7, and shows how Dante appropriates Lucan's poem in order to support his philo-imperial agenda. In anchoring his Christian imperial ideal in the historical precedent of ancient Rome, Dante applies Lucan's text to the task of extolling the Roman political past, considered as a continuous historical reality throughout its monarchic, Republican, and Imperial phases. In so doing, Dante both emphasizes philo-Roman elements already implicit in the Bellum civile and quotes Lucanian passages out of context, thus altering or notably twisting their original meaning. Dante glosses over Lucan's denunciation of inter-Roman civil wars and focuses, rather, on the conflicts that ancient Rome fought and won against its external enemies. Moreover, Dante rereads ancient Roman history as governed by Divine Providence and transforms Lucan's pessimistic historical account into a Christian teleological narrative. In the Epistles, Dante claims that true freedom is only possible under a single ruler and implicitly equates the evils of the Roman civil war with the chaos and anarchy of anti-imperial Florence.","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"126 1","pages":"106 - 81"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88657700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dante, the “anima di fuoco [soul of fire]”—like Mazzini and Garibaldi, the two other main icons of the Risorgimento—gave off “scintille di senso [sparks of meaning]” across time, as Italian historian Mario Isnenghi so aptly put it. This meant he was surrounded by the same constant “effetto alone [halo effect]” that continued even through decades or centuries of apparent silence. Catapulted into modernity by literature and the visual and performing arts, the “Genio gigante [great Genius]”, apostle and prophet of the nation, poet of Italian regeneration, symbol of an individual and collective fate, therefore represented a pulsar memory, both inside and outside the text. For this very reason, as Alberto Savinio stated, “Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are great names but they are timeless: we would say detached from life...they are men-oases, or men-islands, detached from the chain, or better the conveyor belt of ideas.” In the nineteenth century, Mazzini’s thought, the romantic myth, Italophilia, and the civil religion of an Italy devoted to unity and national pride (despite some severe divisions) promoted the internationalization and democratization of culture. These phenomena were responsible for reshaping a cult that was already transnational and reflecting its own identity, capable of combining both high and low culture, scholarship and popularization. So much so, in fact, that patriotic and literary causes were fought in the name of Dante, who was a national hero in the theater, through the 1865 Dante Festival—an event proposed by the English Dante scholar Henry Clark Barlow in the pages of Athaeneum and the Morning Post between 1858 and 1861, following in the footsteps of the national German and English festivities in honor of the literary glory of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe.
{"title":"Performing Dante or Building the Nation?: The Divina Commedia between Dramaturgy of Exile and Public Festivities","authors":"Rossella Bonfatti","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2017.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2017.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Dante, the “anima di fuoco [soul of fire]”—like Mazzini and Garibaldi, the two other main icons of the Risorgimento—gave off “scintille di senso [sparks of meaning]” across time, as Italian historian Mario Isnenghi so aptly put it. This meant he was surrounded by the same constant “effetto alone [halo effect]” that continued even through decades or centuries of apparent silence. Catapulted into modernity by literature and the visual and performing arts, the “Genio gigante [great Genius]”, apostle and prophet of the nation, poet of Italian regeneration, symbol of an individual and collective fate, therefore represented a pulsar memory, both inside and outside the text. For this very reason, as Alberto Savinio stated, “Homer, Dante, and Shakespeare are great names but they are timeless: we would say detached from life...they are men-oases, or men-islands, detached from the chain, or better the conveyor belt of ideas.” In the nineteenth century, Mazzini’s thought, the romantic myth, Italophilia, and the civil religion of an Italy devoted to unity and national pride (despite some severe divisions) promoted the internationalization and democratization of culture. These phenomena were responsible for reshaping a cult that was already transnational and reflecting its own identity, capable of combining both high and low culture, scholarship and popularization. So much so, in fact, that patriotic and literary causes were fought in the name of Dante, who was a national hero in the theater, through the 1865 Dante Festival—an event proposed by the English Dante scholar Henry Clark Barlow in the pages of Athaeneum and the Morning Post between 1858 and 1861, following in the footsteps of the national German and English festivities in honor of the literary glory of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Goethe.","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"401 1","pages":"37 - 67"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74306624","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The studies collected in this volume show the impact that Dante’s political thought has had in historical and geographical circumstances far removed from his own. This essay, intended as a complement to the Introduction by Dennis Looney, turns to the Middle Ages and explores some of Dante’s political ideas as they took shape in light of his own historical and poetic experience, and in relation to the initial reception they elicited. Political concerns traverse Dante’s corpus from his early production to his works of maturity—notably, Convivio 4, De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Commedia, and the political Epistole—and are inseparable from the philosophical, theological, and poetic modes of inquiry that pervade his intellectual career. It is an integrated approach that calls for an equally integrated reading. The phrase Dante politico must be understood in a twofold sense: Dante reflecting on the social nature of human beings— the Aristotelian concept of man as a political animal—and Dante heralding a specific theory of an ideal politia, or form of political organization. While in Aristotle the organized community identifies with the polis, or city-state, Dante’s political unit is the universal empire, an overarching structure that unifies smaller entities such as kingdoms, cities, and villages under a common rule of law. We find Dante’s first pronouncements on this matter in Convivio 4, the treatise revolving around the question of nobility in which Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen figures as Dante’s privileged interlocutor. Defined as “the last emperor of the Romans” (Conv. 4.3.6), Frederick II— lawgiver and himself a theorist of sovereignty in the Liber Augustalis—is not just an opponent in the debate on nobility but the implicit catalyzer of Dante’s discourse on the empire. “The root foundation underlying the Imperial Majesty” Dante declares “is, in truth, man’s need for human society, which is established for a single end: namely, a life of happiness” (Conv. 4.4.1).
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Dante’s memorable invective in Purgatorio 6 has consistently been politicized, especially during the Risorgimento. Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giuseppe Mazzini used the invective while promoting a revolutionary and patriotic Dante. Modern scholars such as Edoardo Sanguineti and Lino Pertile have refuted this political interpretation by classifying Dante and his works as reactionary, antibourgeois, and antidemocratic. However, the question is far from settled, especially if we consider how Purgatorio 6 has acquired great exposure in recent years through new media with wide circulation, such as pamphlets and magazine articles. In this study, I shall examine Paolo Sylos Labini’s Ahi serva Italia: Un appello ai miei concittadini (Servile Italy: An Appeal to My Fellow Citizens) (2006) and James Walston’s “The Bordello State: Italy’s Descent under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi” (2010). Both authors advance their criticism against Berlusconi’s government by using Dante’s invective as their starting point. By doing so, they propagate a “democratic Dante,” reach a worldwide audience, and thus introduce a new political model that differs from both the revolutionary and the reactionary interpretations. While exploring Labini’s and Walston’s works, I will also juxtapose the dynamic exchange that occurred between Walston and one of his most outspoken detractors, the Italian diplomat Giulio Terzi. Finally, I shall assess these political expropriations and appropriations by proposing my own conclusion. Even though Labini and Walston successfully revived the Commedia in contemporary political debates by stirring readers’ response to divisive issues pertaining to Italy’s Seconda Repubblica, they also advance the idea of Dante as the champion of democracy.
{"title":"Dante, Berlusconi, and the Bordello State: Paolo Sylos Labini’s and James Walston’s Democratic Dante at the Ebb of the Seconda Repubblica","authors":"Nicolino Applauso","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2017.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2017.0008","url":null,"abstract":"Dante’s memorable invective in Purgatorio 6 has consistently been politicized, especially during the Risorgimento. Vittorio Alfieri, Ugo Foscolo, and Giuseppe Mazzini used the invective while promoting a revolutionary and patriotic Dante. Modern scholars such as Edoardo Sanguineti and Lino Pertile have refuted this political interpretation by classifying Dante and his works as reactionary, antibourgeois, and antidemocratic. However, the question is far from settled, especially if we consider how Purgatorio 6 has acquired great exposure in recent years through new media with wide circulation, such as pamphlets and magazine articles. In this study, I shall examine Paolo Sylos Labini’s Ahi serva Italia: Un appello ai miei concittadini (Servile Italy: An Appeal to My Fellow Citizens) (2006) and James Walston’s “The Bordello State: Italy’s Descent under Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi” (2010). Both authors advance their criticism against Berlusconi’s government by using Dante’s invective as their starting point. By doing so, they propagate a “democratic Dante,” reach a worldwide audience, and thus introduce a new political model that differs from both the revolutionary and the reactionary interpretations. While exploring Labini’s and Walston’s works, I will also juxtapose the dynamic exchange that occurred between Walston and one of his most outspoken detractors, the Italian diplomat Giulio Terzi. Finally, I shall assess these political expropriations and appropriations by proposing my own conclusion. Even though Labini and Walston successfully revived the Commedia in contemporary political debates by stirring readers’ response to divisive issues pertaining to Italy’s Seconda Repubblica, they also advance the idea of Dante as the champion of democracy.","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"22 1","pages":"249 - 278"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83307430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mi parve che il nostro Boccaccio...così scrivesse la vita e i costumi di tanto sublime poeta, come se a scrivere avesse il Filocolo, o il Filostrato, o la Fiammetta.... Io adunque mi posi in cuore, per mio spasso, scriver di nuovo la vita di Dante con maggior notizia delle cose estimabili. Né questo faccio per derogare al Boccaccio, ma perché lo scriver mio sia quasi in supplimento allo scriver di lui.
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The relevance of Dante’s position in Gramsci’s thought has not been adequately clarified by scholars. There is no extended research on the role and meaning of Dante in the larger framework of Gramsci’s writings. Most discussions focus on Gramsci’s reading of Inferno 10 and are limited to why and how Gramsci read that canto, or what his reading could suggest to us about his aesthetics, hermeneutic philosophy, and theory of art. Recently, new hypotheses have been proposed to look at Gramsci’s notes on Canto 10 from a political perspective. According to Italian scholars Angelo Rossi and Giuseppe Vacca, in order to avoid surveillance, Gramsci—in secret cooperation with Palmiro Togliatti (the leading figure of the Italian Communists), Tania Schucht (Gramsci’s sister-in-law), and his friend Piero Sraffa (then professor of economics at Cambridge University)—had to find new means of political communication with Togliatti and the Party while in exile. Even his interest in Inferno 10 has been seen as an encrypted code for communicating with the communists abroad.
{"title":"Reading Dante Impolitically: Gramsci’s Contrapuntal Criticism of Inferno 10","authors":"S. Selenu","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2017.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2017.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The relevance of Dante’s position in Gramsci’s thought has not been adequately clarified by scholars. There is no extended research on the role and meaning of Dante in the larger framework of Gramsci’s writings. Most discussions focus on Gramsci’s reading of Inferno 10 and are limited to why and how Gramsci read that canto, or what his reading could suggest to us about his aesthetics, hermeneutic philosophy, and theory of art. Recently, new hypotheses have been proposed to look at Gramsci’s notes on Canto 10 from a political perspective. According to Italian scholars Angelo Rossi and Giuseppe Vacca, in order to avoid surveillance, Gramsci—in secret cooperation with Palmiro Togliatti (the leading figure of the Italian Communists), Tania Schucht (Gramsci’s sister-in-law), and his friend Piero Sraffa (then professor of economics at Cambridge University)—had to find new means of political communication with Togliatti and the Party while in exile. Even his interest in Inferno 10 has been seen as an encrypted code for communicating with the communists abroad.","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"14 1","pages":"209 - 248"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87325661","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Dante is a recurring presence in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s prose and lyric works, both as a literary echo and as the object of creative refashioning. One only needs to think of the innumerable more or less literal quotations from the medieval poet that D’Annunzio inserts into his poetry, novels, and personal diaries. Dante inhabits D’Annunzio’s imagination from his early poetic production to his theatrical work Francesca da Rimini, a retelling of Canto 5, his war prose, and his prose poem Il Notturno, which in its structure repeats the three cantiche of the Divina Commedia. In this article, I do not discuss Dante’s literary influence on D’Annunzio—a topic on which much scholarship has been produced—but present D’Annunzio’s reinvention and representation of the character of the Florentine poet. Drawing on Paolo Valesio’s theoretical premise in Gabriele D’Annunzio: The Dark Flame, I consider Dante in D’Annunzio’s literary production as a “cultural sign,” that is, “some–body who finds himself or herself in the process of sign production set into motion by somebody else.” The sign Dante appears in a multiplicity of contexts, as throughout the centuries many authors have used both the life of the poet and the theme of the Commedia to comment upon their own existential or political situation, or else they have made Dante a trope for specific elements in the cultural discourses of their time. For instance, nineteenthcentury European Romanticism, in particular Thomas Carlyle in his Hero and Hero Worship, made Dante a crucial element in the creation of the myth of a “national genius.” Indeed, the manipulation of a given “body” results in a cultural operation that turns that body into a sign. Here, I show that D’Annunzio’s use of Dante reflects his relationship with the political establishment of post-unification Italy and his
但丁在Gabriele D 'Annunzio的散文和抒情作品中反复出现，既是文学的呼应，也是创造性重塑的对象。只要想想达南齐奥在他的诗歌、小说和个人日记中插入的无数或多或少来自中世纪诗人的文字引用就知道了。但丁从早期的诗歌作品到戏剧作品《弗朗西斯卡·达·里米尼》都存在于丹农齐奥的想象中，《弗朗西斯卡·达·里米尼》是第五章的重述，他的战争散文，以及散文诗《Il Notturno》在结构上重复了《神曲》的三个悬臂。在这篇文章中，我不讨论但丁对达南奇奥的文学影响——这是一个已经产生了很多学术成果的话题——而是介绍达南奇奥对佛罗伦萨诗人性格的重塑和表现。根据Paolo Valesio在Gabriele D 'Annunzio: The Dark Flame中的理论前提，我认为但丁在D 'Annunzio的文学作品中是一个“文化符号”，也就是说，“一个人发现他或她自己在符号生产的过程中被其他人启动。”但丁的符号出现在多种语境中，几个世纪以来，许多作家都用诗人的生活和喜剧的主题来评论他们自己的存在或政治处境，或者他们把但丁作为他们那个时代文化话语中特定元素的比喻。例如，19世纪的欧洲浪漫主义，特别是托马斯·卡莱尔的《英雄与英雄崇拜》，使但丁成为创造“民族天才”神话的关键因素。事实上，对一个给定的“身体”的操纵导致了一种文化操作，把那个身体变成了一个符号。在这里，我展示了丹农齐奥对但丁的使用反映了他与统一后意大利政治体制的关系以及他的
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It is hard to imagine a case of philosophical and ideological appropriation of Dante in the twentieth century as pervasive and conspicuous as Giovanni Gentile’s. In fact, Dante is a steady point of reference for Gentile’s own philosophy of the act, or actualism, both in the process of its formation and in its mature formulations. This is true at the level of Gentile’s aesthetics, historiography, ontology, philosophy of history, theory of education, and political philosophy, at which level all these aspects of his thought culminate and are integrated. One century after Ugo Foscolo delineated an Italian
{"title":"Giovanni Gentile’s Reading of Dante as Prophet of the State in interiore homine","authors":"Donatella Stocchi-Perucchio","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2017.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2017.0006","url":null,"abstract":"It is hard to imagine a case of philosophical and ideological appropriation of Dante in the twentieth century as pervasive and conspicuous as Giovanni Gentile’s. In fact, Dante is a steady point of reference for Gentile’s own philosophy of the act, or actualism, both in the process of its formation and in its mature formulations. This is true at the level of Gentile’s aesthetics, historiography, ontology, philosophy of history, theory of education, and political philosophy, at which level all these aspects of his thought culminate and are integrated. One century after Ugo Foscolo delineated an Italian","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"175 1","pages":"169 - 207"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82677553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In October 1921, the German Catholic literary monthly der Gral, under the editorship of Friedrich Muckermann, S.J., published a special issue devoted to the sexcentenary commemoration of the death of Dante. This special number is a microcosm of the issues surrounding the German Dante revival that followed the disastrous conclusion of World War I. German intellectuals of varying political and religious persuasions, especially those outside the university, were vying in the popular press to define Dante’s relationship to Germany and his meaning for the contemporary crisis. The importance assigned to Dante in German postwar reconstruction illustrates the cultural power that literature was thought to have. Discussions swirling around Dante during the sexcentenary were fraught with questions about the nature of national identity and the shape of postwar recovery. The sexcentenary coincided with the still-novel claims, especially in Germany (where Dante was often considered a precursor of Luther), that Dante was a loyal Catholic, that he should be read in relation to traditional Catholic teaching, and that, as such, his Catholic worldview supplied the undergirding of the path toward German revival in the wake of the war. The tussle between Catholics and Protestants over Dante is one of the most remarkable examples of the transmigration of a monumental literary work across religious denominations in a process we might call “re-confessionalization,” or the revisionist transformation of religious identity. Muckermann intended his special Dante issue and his own essays in it to contribute in a major way not only to this Catholic re-confessionalization of Dante, but also, through it, to a larger literary program that would
{"title":"The Sexcentenary Commemoration of Dante’s Death and the German Re-Confessionalization of Dante: Friedrich Muckermann and der Gral","authors":"M. Elsky","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2017.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2017.0005","url":null,"abstract":"In October 1921, the German Catholic literary monthly der Gral, under the editorship of Friedrich Muckermann, S.J., published a special issue devoted to the sexcentenary commemoration of the death of Dante. This special number is a microcosm of the issues surrounding the German Dante revival that followed the disastrous conclusion of World War I. German intellectuals of varying political and religious persuasions, especially those outside the university, were vying in the popular press to define Dante’s relationship to Germany and his meaning for the contemporary crisis. The importance assigned to Dante in German postwar reconstruction illustrates the cultural power that literature was thought to have. Discussions swirling around Dante during the sexcentenary were fraught with questions about the nature of national identity and the shape of postwar recovery. The sexcentenary coincided with the still-novel claims, especially in Germany (where Dante was often considered a precursor of Luther), that Dante was a loyal Catholic, that he should be read in relation to traditional Catholic teaching, and that, as such, his Catholic worldview supplied the undergirding of the path toward German revival in the wake of the war. The tussle between Catholics and Protestants over Dante is one of the most remarkable examples of the transmigration of a monumental literary work across religious denominations in a process we might call “re-confessionalization,” or the revisionist transformation of religious identity. Muckermann intended his special Dante issue and his own essays in it to contribute in a major way not only to this Catholic re-confessionalization of Dante, but also, through it, to a larger literary program that would","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"101 1","pages":"129 - 168"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1353/MDI.2017.0005","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72534929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
There is something to be said about the presence of Dante in ItalianAmerican letters and culture. And just saying that “something,” saying that it is there and it is worthy of a critical discourse, might prove to fulfill a significant part of the overall meaning of Dante among Americans of Italian descent. In fact, Dante’s position within Italian America is so obvious, and even in some way so predictable, that it is quite simply not very much considered. It is as if it is so taken for granted—especially by educated people and scholars—that it goes unnoticed, which is a telltale paradox. This unconscious strategy of effacement seems an introjection of the much wider removal experienced by Italian Americans both in the United States and in Italy. It functions—Dante’s removal, or bracketing—as a homeopathic remedy that stimulates and readies the larger Italian-American social body for its comfortable marginality. But this is made possible by the fact that Dante as a whole—his texts, his figura, the aura of his authority—has had a long history in North America, to the point that, as a cultural pawnbroker, he has acquired a quasi-ItalianAmerican status. Identifying with Dante implies legitimizing the history and existence of an Italian-American culture, and providing its experience with a radical narrative of searching and foundation, which is liable to be used both as an existential compass and as a shared, collective patrimony. A sign (yet another) of Dante’s inexhaustible depth, but also of the pliability of Italian-American culture, is the fact that the allegorical journey and the towering stature of the poet could and can be adapted to totally different historical conditions, forging a somewhat plausible dialogue between fiction and reality, between a God quest and a harsh economic pull. Dante and his encyclopedia are
{"title":"“Our Brother Dante”: Dantesque Reappropriations in Italian America","authors":"M. Marazzi","doi":"10.1353/MDI.2017.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/MDI.2017.0003","url":null,"abstract":"There is something to be said about the presence of Dante in ItalianAmerican letters and culture. And just saying that “something,” saying that it is there and it is worthy of a critical discourse, might prove to fulfill a significant part of the overall meaning of Dante among Americans of Italian descent. In fact, Dante’s position within Italian America is so obvious, and even in some way so predictable, that it is quite simply not very much considered. It is as if it is so taken for granted—especially by educated people and scholars—that it goes unnoticed, which is a telltale paradox. This unconscious strategy of effacement seems an introjection of the much wider removal experienced by Italian Americans both in the United States and in Italy. It functions—Dante’s removal, or bracketing—as a homeopathic remedy that stimulates and readies the larger Italian-American social body for its comfortable marginality. But this is made possible by the fact that Dante as a whole—his texts, his figura, the aura of his authority—has had a long history in North America, to the point that, as a cultural pawnbroker, he has acquired a quasi-ItalianAmerican status. Identifying with Dante implies legitimizing the history and existence of an Italian-American culture, and providing its experience with a radical narrative of searching and foundation, which is liable to be used both as an existential compass and as a shared, collective patrimony. A sign (yet another) of Dante’s inexhaustible depth, but also of the pliability of Italian-American culture, is the fact that the allegorical journey and the towering stature of the poet could and can be adapted to totally different historical conditions, forging a somewhat plausible dialogue between fiction and reality, between a God quest and a harsh economic pull. Dante and his encyclopedia are","PeriodicalId":36685,"journal":{"name":"Scripta Mediaevalia","volume":"91 1","pages":"109 - 69"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-12-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83779301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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