Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture by Manuele Gragnolati

Abstract

MLR, 102. I, 2007 249 Space: New Dimensions inFrench Studies. Ed. by EMMAGILBY and KATJAHAUSTEIN. (Modern French Identities, 30) Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang. 2005. I69 pp. ,C23. ISBN 978-3-03910-I78-8. Emma Gilby and Katja Haustein's volume contains nine essays interrogatingnotions of space inFrench literature and exploring ambivalences in themapping of space in texts from themedieval era to the present day. Playing on the somewhat overused phraseology of 'new directions' and 'new paradigms' inFrench Studies, the authors here promise to examine 'new dimensions', a formulation inwhich the engagement with space offersamore conceptually coherent fieldof enquiry than itspredecessors, even if italso risksoverstating the volume's claim to originality.The premiss of the collection is that 'spaces and places are not a priori conditions of human perception but products, historically changeable and constituted by various cultural andmedical practices' (p. i i). Plato's Timaeus, forexample, indicates that space has no inherent qualities, and inKristeva's view, the chora towhich Plato refersevokes thatwhich is anterior to the symbolic, tonaming. As a result, the field isopen for the contributors to reinterpret space inmultiple and diverse ways. In the three sections of thework, space is firstboth physical and textual, secondly, itcan bemarked out and remapped, and finally,itbecomes disorienting and alienating in the context of themodern city. The essays themselves aremostly of a high quality, and though heterogeneous in their subject-matter, combine to offera provocatively dislocating vision of themalleability ofour thinkingon space. Particularly successful contributions include Emma Cayley's comparison of thepoet's self-inscription in latemedieval French manuscripts with a game of chess, so that textual topography becomes a site of competition. Emily Tom linson analyses the white spaces ofDjebar's Le Blanc de l'Algerie inorder toargue that Algeria's deceased are effaced yet demand our attention, and her piece ties in interest ingly with Emma Wilson's article on the city inHiroshima monAmour as a site of the necessary but impossible commemoration of unspeakable violence. Both Rosemary Chapman and Kathryn Gannon look at reconfigurations of colonial space inCanadian literature,and Chapman demonstrates how Gabrielle Roy's work resists freezing the North as a site ofotherness while Gannon uncovers theways in which Maillet's Pelagie challenges thecolonial tendency toconceive theNew World as ablank canvas onwhich the colonizer can write or paint his own vision. Mairi Liston examines the demarca tion of interiorand exterior in the journals of theGoncourt brothers through the lens of Walter Benjamin's theories ofParis in theSecond Empire, and Eve Richardson uses Marc Auge's concept of thenon-lieu toexplore depthless space inJean-Philippe Tous saint and Nicholson Baker. Although the introduction briefly sketches the interplay between these conceptions, however, the volume might have been more compelling if more work had been done on the notion of remapping and reinventing space that appears tounify it.This isof course a difficult taskwhen the contributors offer their own unique approach, but theremight have been space for furtherconsideration of the role of both perception and writing inestablishing and shiftingdimensions. EXETERCOLLEGE,OXFORD JANE HIDDLESTON Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante andMedieval Culture. ByMANUELE GRAGNOLATI. (The William and Katherine Devers Series inDante Studies, 7) Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press. 2005. xvii + 279 pp. $50 (pbk $25). ISBN 978-o-268-02964-7 (pbk 978-o-268-02965-4). Dante criticism all too seldom ventures beyond theconfines of awell-defined canon of learned and literary texts.But this reluctance is triumphantly challenged in Manuele Gragnolati's excellent book onDante andmedieval eschatology. This seventh volume 250 Reviews in theDevers Series explores the connections between theCommedia and theNorth ern Italian tradition of popular, didactic vernacular poetry, in particular Bonvesin della Riva's tripartiteLibro de le trescritture.Taken together,Chapters i and 3 offer an important revision of the tendency among earlier critics todismiss thepossibility thatBonvesin could be meaningfully viewed as a precursor toDante. The cultural context that interestsGragnolati is that of a shift in eschatological emphasis from theLast Judgement at the end of history to theperiod between death and theResurrection, a period inwhich the soul, though theoretically separated from thebody, was nevertheless envisioned as embodied and capable of experiencing phy sical pain and delight. After an initialconsideration of thework...