Nel mezzo: Roland Barthes’s Mediated Dante and Dantean Figures of Mediation

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this essay, I consider the reception of Dante by the twentieth-century French theorist and writer Roland Barthes. Barthes did not otherwise evince much interest in Italian literature, in poetry, nor indeed in the Middle Ages. Dante is therefore exceptional in Barthes’s writings, and present particularly in the late Barthes and in texts written after the death of Barthes’s mother. Most striking is Barthes’s expressed intention around this time to write a novel that would bear the same title as Dante’s youthful prosimetrum: Vita Nova. I reflect on why Barthes should have turned to Dante at this point, thinking especially about the mediators between the two, including critics (Jean-Michel Gardair) and translators (Alexandre Masseron, André Pézard). More generally, I also examine figures of mediation within Dante’s own work, in particular the guide figure, the book-as-guide, and the screen lady, the first two of which were admired by Barthes.