Divine Comedy Research Articles

Dante in Mogadishu: The Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah's Links

This article aims to explore the complex network of intra-textual and intertextual references to Dante’s The Divine Comedy in Nuruddin Farah’s novel Links (2005). By analyzing the quotations from the poem, this essay wishes to show how the Comedy informs the novel at various levels, from the paratext (since Dante’s tercets from Inferno are chosen as an epigraph) to the text itself (since Inferno appears to be deeply constitutive of Links). The analysis then suggests that, on the one hand, Farah employs Dante’s poem to address, represent and understand the civil-war context of Somalia from the protagonist’s point of view. On the other, he subverts and re-contextualizes Inferno to create new meanings and to distance his novel from Dante’s literary antecedent. Therefore, by analyzing the practices of intertextuality between the two texts, this essay aims to investigate both the converging and conflicting strategies enabled in the novel.

ВНУТРИ ДАНТОВСКИХ МИРОВ: СИМВОЛИЧЕСКОЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВО «DANTE-СИМФОНИЙ» БОРИСА ТИЩЕНКО К 755-летию со дня рождения Данте Алигьери (1265–1321)

The article is devoted to the embodiment of Dante's "Divine Comedy" in the music of the Saint Petersburg composer Boris Tishchenko (1939–2010) using his "Dante Symphonies", op. 123 (1997–2005) as an example. There are several studies, analyzing various aspects of the implementation of the immortal Dante's masterpiece in the field of musical art. Among these works it is worth mentioning the research essays dedicated directly to "Dante-symphonies", which are authored by A. N. Knyazev, G. P. Ovsyankina, M. S. Samarina, S. Yu. Sumin. The present research lies in the plane of the local key problem, which brings relevance and novelty to the sphere of modern musical dantology — synthesis of numerical codes and biblical symbols in "Dante-symphonies". The article reviews biblical symbolism as the forming element of Boris Tishchenko's "Dantesymphonies". The analysis reveals the principles of synthesis of composer's techniques of the XXth century, sacred symbolism of the Holy Writ and numerical codes. The accompanying text to the symphony is studied. The author examines characteristic features of the composer's style as applied to the musical language of "Dante-symphonies".

Integrating the Digital Humanities into the Second Language Classroom by Melinda A. Cro

Reviewed by: Integrating the Digital Humanities into the Second Language Classroom by Melinda A. Cro Jessica L. Sturm Cro, Melinda A. Integrating the Digital Humanities into the Second Language Classroom. Georgetown UP, 2020. ISBN 978-1-62616-776-6. Pp. 90. The digital humanities are (is? as the author mentions, no one can agree whether it is singular or plural) an established part of our current existence. This text, most importantly, gives a thorough definition of the digital humanities: making, building, or sharing information about texts; providing multiple means of approaching the text. The author additionally provides clear examples of what one can create or access via the digital humanities, from a multimodal, interactional resource on Dante's Divine Comedy to a project at Stanford University in which researchers are determining whether a computer-generated algorithm can recognize a literary genre. The goal of the book is to explore the place of such projects in the second-language classroom, given the presence of the digital humanities in the non-English speaking world. Cro provides a guide to integrating the digital levels at multiple levels of inflection. The "weak" inflection uses "Bloom-and-Fade" or isolated assignments that do not account for a significant portion of the final course grade. A "medium" inflection would include multi-step projects that account for perhaps 10–20% of the course grade. A "strong" inflection could be either a full course or a multi-course implementation. An entire course (or sequence of courses) could be "scaffolded into various assignments that culminate in a final DH project" (30). Her suggestions at each level are excellent ideas for implementing the digital humanities, perhaps gradually by moving from isolated assignments to a full course implementation. Alternatively, an instructor looking to completely renovate their course could look to this guide for the full or multi-course implementation. Beginning language course sequences could integrate the digital humanities as a multi-course implementation. This would allow instructors to show students what they can do with their new language and provide the students with a portfolio or other such tangible work for their CVs or résumés. Culture and other content courses could scaffold the course work toward a final digital humanities project. The digital humanities approach as outlined by Cro is content-driven. Students will be creating with the language and interacting with authentic materials. It is task-based in that creating multi-step projects or even isolated assignments present items to accomplish (while using the language). It is collaborative and communicative as the class or group will work together (in the target language) to make, build, and share their work. Each of these aspects allow students to see the language as a means for expression rather than a set of facts (lexicon, syntax, phonology) to memorize and produce on demand. Students can experience the language as a living tool and will have motivation to improve their skills to communicate more effectively. Further, the author articulates the ways in which the digital humanities can increase digital readiness in students and the inclusive/equalizing nature of such an approach. In summary, the ideas presented in this guide are excellent suggestions for the language classroom at any level. [End Page 288] Jessica L. Sturm Purdue University (Indiana) Copyright © 2020 American Association of Teachers of French

Samiha KhraisThe Tree Stump: An Arabic Historical Novel by Nesreen Akhtarkhavari

Salo is joined by other refugees from various attacks orchestrated by the Yerezis’ malefactor and the warlord Dark Sun, with chapters regularly switching perspectives to tell an engaging story of young people growing into adulthood and newfound powers. With Scarlet Odyssey, Rwizi has written a novel that is expertly plotted, incredibly well thought out where magical and cultural systems are concerned, and also quite bloody. While not as literarily deft as Marlon James’s recent Black Leopard, Red Wolf (see WLT, Spring 2019, 80) or Jemisin ’s record-breaking Broken Earth trilogy, Scarlet Odyssey deserves to be recognized as a powerful force in the growing Afrofantasy movement. Sean Guynes Michigan State University Samiha Khrais The Tree Stump: An Arabic Historical Novel Trans. Nesreen Akhtarkhavari. East Lansing. Michigan State University Press. 2019. 174 pages. SAMIHA KHRAIS is a Jordanian novelist whose work has the imprimatur of those with heft, political and cultural, in her native land. The winner of, among other awards, the Al-Hussein Medal for Distinguished Creativity (2015), she addresses herself in The Tree Stump to the question of Jordan’s origins in the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Turks. It is perhaps inevitable, then, that one has a slight sense of reading, if not an official account, then at least one that will not displease her compatriots or the (admittedly largely benevolent) dynasty that rules over them. However, the historical background to the creation of the only surviving Hashemite dynasty, that of Iraq having been bloodily overthrown in 1958 and the Kingdom of Syria strangled at birth, is further complicated by the controversial figure of T. E. Lawrence, prominent in the minds of many putative readers of this translation because of a memorable film and in the minds of a few because of a brilliant, if idiosyncratic, autobiographical account of his role in the region, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). Indeed, the wish to provide an alternative account to Lawrence’s, one rooted in the experiences of Arabs, is avowedly central to the book. Information obtained during Khrais’s meetings with tribal elders “challenged the narrative that Lawrence and most Western historians provided,” resulting in a novel that celebrates the valor of Arab warriors fighting for their freedom and culture and the inspiration given by their strong women, whose strength, contra stereotyping views of the West, “is perceived as a source of honor and pride for the men.” One would expect the role Books in Review ANDRÉ NAFFIS-SAHELY The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature Ed. André Naffis-Sahely London. Pushkin Press. 2020. 352 pages. HARDLY A LITERARY POSITION exists that trumps that of the exile and the émigré. Of course, not every exile succeeds in fashioning from their banishment a new whole or fresh start, imprinting elsewhere; those who do succeed can acquire an aura akin to that of a saint. In this anthology, André Naffis-Sahely sizes up the phenomenon of exile across ages, cultures, and causes, from the ancient and biblical through the Dark Ages and into the age of nations, considering political, religious , and personal reasons for exile, right up to more contemporary notions of “cosmopolitanism and rootlessness.” Many, but by no means all, of the authors of passages in this volume have themselves been exiles, including Naffis-Sahely himself. Yet in every case, care is taken to present excerpts that foreground exile and related states as their topic. Sometimes these converge —author and topic—as in the passage from Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the author meets the exiled Cacciaguida, who warns Dante of his own coming 102 WLT AUTUMN 2020 exile from Florence. More often, exile is the focus but not the fate of the author. There is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, for example, and Longfellow spells out the tragic fate of Acadie’s Evangeline, severed from her Gabriel: “Thus did that poor soul wander in want and cheerless discomfort, / Bleeding, barefooted, over the shards and thorns of existence.” Ample pages are devoted to tales of exile outside the Western canon. From ancient China, we get Du Fu, “Dreaming of Li Bai” (trans. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping): I’ve swallowed sobs of the lost dead...

Fighting Back

Fighting Back Speer Morgan Midway in our life's journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood. —Dante, The Divine Comedy While temperamentally many of us imagine human lives to be stable, a simple factual recounting of what happens through time proves that they seldom are. Surprises and shocks are in store for most of us. Bruce Feiler's new book Life Is in the Transitions discusses this idea abstractly and by example from detailed interviews of hundreds of individuals. They show that fixed patterns do not work well as life predictors in such areas as jobs, health, and personal commitments. They also suggest that insofar as we need a set of presumptions about our futures, it should allow for and expect transitions—not just small alterations but big changes. I appreciate this idea because it matches my own life experiences and because it is suggested by the radical changes in understanding in most areas of knowledge, from economics and history to the hard sciences. Feiler points out that early worldviews were based on natural and cyclical time, partly because of the prevalence of agriculture in human life. Early mythologies were seasonal, though there were exceptions that admitted to linearity or the unexpected, for example, in classic religious thought and literature. The nineteenth century moved to a worldview [End Page 5] based on mechanical time, which is regular and linear. By the early modern era, the idea of life following a circle had been replaced by a concept of its proceeding through ages or phases or stages that were essentially predictable and fixed. During the nineteenth century, people became time obsessed, and by the end of the century the linear view was the dominant model, especially in sciences such as biology, psychology, and economics, among thinkers such as Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx. Freud believed that all humans were permanently shaped by a series of relatively inevitable psychosexual stages they were expected to pass through between birth and late childhood. Such linear views were espoused as late as the 1970s with Gail Sheehy's best-selling book Passages, describing what she depicted as an inevitable midlife crisis—a theory that she borrowed from preliminary studies by psychologists. This idea of fixed phases of life and a singular dominant midlife crisis, influential for well over a decade, is now seen as largely irrelevant and perhaps one of the last widely believed linear life models. Since then, such views have evolved with changes in the sciences, and human experience is now seen as dynamic, unpredictable, or nonlinear. One of the early widely recognized examples came from meteorology. Edward Lorenz's study of weather prediction hypothesized the butterfly effect, which points out that a tiny influence at some distant and effectively undiscoverable point in a system can cause changes or even extreme irregularity. This was soon recognized to be more broadly true, especially in complex systems such as those of mathematics, cosmology, biology, and water dynamics, as well as weather. The linear model has been replaced by the nonlinear. Everyday events that reshape lives can be disrupters, and they are more common than we may expect. In human life, disrupters can include love, identity, economics, beliefs, work, or the human body. They can occur at any point in life, not just at forty-one (midlife crisis) but at six or seventy-six or just about any age. The average worker today holds twelve different jobs before the age of fifty. People with higher educations can expect to change jobs fifteen times and acquire completely altered skill sets three times. The median number of jobs a person has is thirteen; the number of moves in our lives is around twelve. The number of significant accidents is about three. Many feel that their lives are off course, out of sync, while in fact they are statistically typical. The average number of significant changes, or what Feiler and others call "life quakes," is three to five. These major [End Page 6] changes can be either personal or collective; they can be voluntary or involuntary, and a surprising number of them involve intentionally rejecting a...

Vernacular: Its Features, Relativity, Functions and Social Significance

In daily communication, people use different language varieties when contacting each other depending on different social contexts determined by factors such as participants, the setting and the topic. The use of different language varieties bears different functions or social significance. Generally, the more formal the language between participants is, the more distant their relationship; the more informal the language between participants is, the more intimate their relationship. Usually, people in the same region communicate with each other in regional dialects; people from the same social stratum or class communicate with each other in social dialects; people who are well-educated or distant in relationship or who do not share the same language or culture communicate with each other in standard language; and people from the same community or region, who are intimate to each other or who share one language or one culture communicate with each other in vernacular language. In nearly every speech community, there exists a certain vernacular language. Vernacular language is indigenous, native or local, spoken either by a rural or urban speech community, or by a lower social class; it is informal, or casual, or the least standardized; it is contrastively used with standard language; it is uncodified, but when there is a need, it is codified through the use of the dominant language, i.e., usually the standard language; its existence relies heavily on the dominant language; it is usually acquired as a first variety in the home; it is featured by colloquialisms, vulgarisms, substandard forms, and slang. There are hundreds of vernacular languages throughout the world, there. Vernacular languages, often used for a relatively narrow range of informal functions, include ethnic or tribal languages which are usually the first languages learned by people from those ethnic or tribal groups. The most typical example of vernacular language is Black English Vernacular in America. Vernacular language is even used by some writers in their literary works – Mark Twain in his <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i> and Dante in his <i>Divine Comedy</i>. Vernacular language may become a standard language if standard language becomes outdated or is abandoned by the public. It is indispensable in daily communication as it is complementary to standard language. It can never be regarded as sub-standard or inadequate, however, as it is an important language variety.

Dante and Economics

Dante and Economics coordinated by antonio montefusco and filippo petricca Introduction E su cotesto andare gli sciatti semplicioni potrebbero ridurre tutta la storia all'aritmetica commerciale; e da ultimo una nuova interpretazione autentica di Dante potrebbe darci la Divina Commedia illustrata coi conti delle pezze di panno, che gli astuti mercanti fiorentini vendeano con tanto profitto loro! (Labriola 1896) In 1927, the philosopher Benedetto Croce argued that socialism revitalized the political landscape and affected every aspect of intellectual life in Italy. Yet there was a space which socialism could not penetrate: literature. Croce was responding explicitly to Frederick Engels's preface to the Italian edition of the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1893). Engels claimed that, just as medieval Italy was the cradle [End Page 176] of capitalism and Dante its poet, at the end of the nineteenth century Italy was awaiting the Dante of socialism (Engels 1893). For Croce, conversely, poetry was irreducible to economics, and Dante's gaze at the past was precisely what made him a poet: "Dante era uno spirito doloroso, in contrasto coi suoi tempi, e rivolto romanticamente al passato, e perciò fu poeta" (Croce 1991 [1927]: 207–8). Croce and Engels exemplify the two main approaches that twentiethcentury scholars have taken to Dante and economics. On the one hand, Dante is presented as resistant to the rising monetary economy, rescuing the Empire and the Church in an anachronistic attempt to reform the system and preserve a declining medieval world. On the other, Dante emerges as a champion of progress: capitalist, modern, socialist or democratic, sometimes aligned with the poor and sometimes with the wealthy class. The contradictions apparent across these conclusions raise the question: what exactly does it mean to investigate Dante and economics? As we know, economics was not a separate discipline in the Middle Ages. What we understand today as "economics" was then a set of rules and aspects intertwined with theology, philosophy, and broader moral concerns (Lambertini 2019), encompassing questions of the circulation and distribution of resources, the determination of value, the nature and fairness of exchange, monetary policies, and legislation. Dante certainly engages with these themes in his works: he stages and envisions systems of distribution; he presents sins such as avarice, simony, usury, and greed; he uses language and metaphors involving trade, usury, and debt; he represents money, and takes sides in the theorization of excess and moderation, trade and gift. These matters were particularly important in the context of late medieval Florence, a city under transformation, with an increasing population, a growing economy, and an expanding trade network (Faini 2010, Day Jr. 2015; Goldthwaite 2009; Caferro 2020). So where was Dante standing in relationship to this world in flux? Was he aware of the significant financial shifts and techniques that Florence was witnessing and developing at this time? Did he reject or embrace the economic changes that made the Florentine economy so influential? In what follows, we examine the state of the field in order to orient readers around the constellations of scholarly debates on this topic, and then move to considering the specific contributions to this Forum. [End Page 177] I After the Italian publication of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, a few scholars engaged the question of Dante's attitude towards the rise of capitalism in medieval Florence. The first monograph on Dante and economics by Livio Cibrario proposed a distinctly moderate view of Dante's relationship to the economic world. For Cibrario, Dante condemned avarice, usury, wealth, and greed and opposed the newcomers in Florence, but had a neutral attitude towards commerce (Cibrario 1898: 78). Cibrario's book was an early attempt to analyze Dante's text in light of economic practices in Florence and alongside canonists and theologians' writings on economic matters (Einaudi 1898). Around the same time, two of the most influential historians of Florence, Gaetano Salvemini and Robert Davidsohn, inquired into the political and economic landscape of medieval Florence, later placing Dante within this context (Davidsohn 1896–1929; Salvemini 1899 and 1936). With Croce, Davidsohn and Salvemini shared the idea that Dante was not ahead of his time; with Marx and Engels, they called attention to the social phenomena surrounding him...

İLAHİ KOMEDYAYI HEYKELİN DİLİNDEN OKUMAK

Efforts to bring art disciplines closer to each other may, from time to time, minimize the differences between them and suggest a common purpose identity, while paving the way for the emergence of works that hybridize in sensory and emotional contexts, in which words, colors, light, shadow and forms are fused in context. While this ambiguous and transdisciplinary approach is encountered almost every period in the historical flow of art, the words of the ancient Greek poet Simonides, painting is a silent poem and poetry is a talking painting art, is a reference to transcend the borders and creating new relationship planes, a result of the nature of art that opens the door to plural is reflex. The purpose of this research is to reveal new readings produced by the dialogue between art and literature, and to examine the formulations of convergence between literary phenomena and plastic arts, through selected sculptural works of Dante Alighieri, in which one of the world's most famous epic poems, called Divine Comedy, was used as a theoretical background. When the ontological creation process, which art tries to carry out through traditional methods, is synthesized with another practice when it limits the possibilities of expression, it can transform the work created into a cumulative structure, and trigger the expansion of the field of meaning by piling up the generated idea and information.

Misogyny and Auto-Biographical Fiction: The Corbaccio's Ambiguity in Bernat Metge's Lo somni

Misogyny and Auto-Biographical Fiction:The Corbaccio's Ambiguity in Bernat Metge's Lo somni Pau Cañigueral Batllosera Giovanni Boccaccio is known as the author of a vast Humanistic work in Latin, as the creator of the Decameron, the first large collection of short stories in vernacular, and as one of the three Crowns, along with Dante and Petrarch, that represent the crossroads between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Boccaccio was an admirer of Dante. He wrote a biography of Dante and a commentary of the Divine Comedy. He was also a friend of Petrarch, with whom he maintained an epistolary relationship and even met in person in 1351 (Branca, The Man 86–96). However, the image that stands behind his creative works in vernacular could not be more different from these two other authors. If Dante's Comedy embodies the ideal fusion of poetry and theology and Petrarch's the Canzoniere is the highest expression of stylistic perfection, Boccaccio has been portrayed as the champion of sensual love and licentiousness (Hollander, Boccaccio's Two Venuses 3). No other proof is needed than the numerous lascivious passages of the Decameron where female characters seem to always find a way to satisfy their sexual appetite while keeping their honor, or the Elegy of Lady Fiammetta, the memories of a young woman who will use any argument to justify her adultery. The Corbaccio seems to contradict this assumption of Boccaccio's literary production. Written between 1354 and 1366 (Padoan, "Sulla" 199–201), right after or during the composition of the Decameron, this [End Page 367] work contains one of the harshest misogynistic diatribes of medieval Romance literatures. In the prologue, the main character, who is also the narrator, calls the work "umile trattato" and thus he suggests that his book does not come without a moral message. In the afterword, he claims that his work should be a warning to those young men who are in love and he begs to keep it out of women's reach. In the middle, this narrator recounts us the vision he has after being scorned by his lover, a middle-aged widow. He finds himself lost in a dark valley when suddenly the spirit of the widow's husband appears to reveal to him the degenerate nature of women and, particularly, that of his old wife. The plot is very simple: a man who has lost his way because of lust will start a spiritual journey towards salvation. This is the same framework of Dante's Vita nuova and Comedy but with a radical change on the argumentation. While Dante focuses on the male lover's weakness to resist sexual temptation, Boccaccio highlights that women play a prominent role in men's damnation by pushing them into sin. As Hollander pointed out, criticism of the Corbaccio can be divided into three main groups (Boccaccio's Last Fiction 42). The first group includes critics who have read it as an attack against women from the author himself. According to this interpretive line, Giovanni Boccaccio would have presumably had some sort of frustrated love story with a widow when he was past forty, and wrote the Corbaccio to take revenge of her. Critics of the second group distance themselves from any autobiographical reading, but maintain the assumption that Boccaccio would have been completely serious about the misogynistic content of his work. Finally, the third group includes critics claiming that the Corbaccio is neither autobiographical nor a condemnation of women's morality but a parody of misogyny—an act of rejection of those moralists who had attacked the Decameron. Even though this essay sides with the last group of critics,1 I need to assert from the beginning that I do not attempt to offer a definitive reading of the Corbaccio. The reason why critics have been coalescing around three different interpretive lines is due to the nature of the work itself. Hollander states that "the Boccaccian narrator is distinguished by being always unreliable or, at best, enigmatic" (Boccaccio's Last Fiction 25). The behavior of Boccaccio's narrators is stated as one thing, but then immediately contradicted by the narrators themselves, who do the opposite...

Dante the Everyman

January 01 2020 Dante the Everyman Marco Martinelli, Marco Martinelli Marco Martinelli, playwright and director, and Ermanna Montanari, actress, author, and set designer, founded the Teatro delle Albe (1983) in Ravenna, Italy, and share its artistic direction. Martinelli's texts have been staged in several European countries, South America, Africa, and the U.S. and translated into French, German, and English. He has received several awards, including: seven Ubu Prizes, the Prize for Career Achievement-Festival Journées théâtrales (Carthage, Tunisia), the Vereinigung Deutsch-Italienischer Kultur Gesellschaften cultural award 2018. MONTANARI, the recipient of the Eleonora Duse Prize, among many others, is known for her vocal and musical research. Her virtuosic work with the voice is the subject of several books and essays in multiple languages. In 2017, the artists premiered their first movie, Aung San Suu Kyi's Life Under Arrest, written and directed by Martinelli, with Montanari in the title role. Their film The Sky over Kibera, takes as its subject the Divine Comedy, brought to life in Nairobi with one-hundred and fifty children and adolescents. In 1991, Martinelli and Montanari founded Ravenna Teatro, at the Teatro Rasi in Ravenna. (teatrodellealbe.com) Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Thomas Haskell Simpson Thomas Haskell Simpson Thomas Haskell Simpson is currently visiting professor in the department of language and literature (LeLiA) at the University of Bari (Italy) where he teaches courses on translating contemporary American theatre. His article “New American Theatre in the Age of Trump,” will be published in 2019 by the press at Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Marco Martinelli Marco Martinelli, playwright and director, and Ermanna Montanari, actress, author, and set designer, founded the Teatro delle Albe (1983) in Ravenna, Italy, and share its artistic direction. Martinelli's texts have been staged in several European countries, South America, Africa, and the U.S. and translated into French, German, and English. He has received several awards, including: seven Ubu Prizes, the Prize for Career Achievement-Festival Journées théâtrales (Carthage, Tunisia), the Vereinigung Deutsch-Italienischer Kultur Gesellschaften cultural award 2018. MONTANARI, the recipient of the Eleonora Duse Prize, among many others, is known for her vocal and musical research. Her virtuosic work with the voice is the subject of several books and essays in multiple languages. In 2017, the artists premiered their first movie, Aung San Suu Kyi's Life Under Arrest, written and directed by Martinelli, with Montanari in the title role. Their film The Sky over Kibera, takes as its subject the Divine Comedy, brought to life in Nairobi with one-hundred and fifty children and adolescents. In 1991, Martinelli and Montanari founded Ravenna Teatro, at the Teatro Rasi in Ravenna. (teatrodellealbe.com) Thomas Haskell Simpson Thomas Haskell Simpson is currently visiting professor in the department of language and literature (LeLiA) at the University of Bari (Italy) where he teaches courses on translating contemporary American theatre. His article “New American Theatre in the Age of Trump,” will be published in 2019 by the press at Sofia University, St. Kliment Ohridski. Online Issn: 1537-9477 Print Issn: 1520-281X © 2020 Thomas Haskell Simpson2020Thomas Haskell Simpson PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (2020) 42 (1 (124)): 78–81. https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00513 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share MailTo Twitter LinkedIn Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Search Site Citation Marco Martinelli, Thomas Haskell Simpson; Dante the Everyman. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 2020; 42 (1 (124)): 78–81. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/pajj_a_00513 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAll JournalsPAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art Search Advanced Search This content is only available as a PDF. © 2020 Thomas Haskell Simpson2020Thomas Haskell Simpson Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Applications of Calligraphy for the Creation of Artworks of na Interdisciplinary Nature

European Calligraphy has a millennial history that has been marked by various stages and vicissitudes that influence modern aesthetic tendencies in calligraphy and typography. In the forthcoming conference will be presented some interesting examples of fundamental calligraphy scripts and their interpretations, as well as the preparation and realization of illustrations in graphic prints (lithography). The final result are artistic books inspired by Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy poem, and in particular the Hell part, as well as Gustav Dore's graphics. The books are enriched with specially made cases, that further fortify the creative pursuits of the authors and to arouse interest in the viewer. The interdisciplinary approach and complex tasks, including 3D graphics and virtual reality, present a new read on book, illustration and calligraphy. Keywords: Calligraphy, Interdisciplinary, Virtual Reality, 3D Graphics, Artistic Book, Lithography

Il sacrilegio di Vanni Fucci pistoiese e bestia nella Divina Commedia

The sacrilege of Vanni Fucci, the beast of Pistoia, in the Divine Comedy This hermeneutic analysis presents a reflection on the complex nature of the concept of theft in the Christian world, compared to the pagan one. The author develops the idea of the desperate blasphemy of the infernal prisoner as a form of unconscious prayer. Vanni Fucci from Pistoia, the sacrilegious and blasphemous character of Dante’s Inferno, is analyzed by referring to the fundamental difference between the classical and medieval philosophical perception of metamorphosis as a symbol.

‘Honor the great poet’. The Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s contribution to the development of Polish Dante studies

The article analyses the Józef Ignacy Kraszewski’s contribution to the development of Dante studies in Poland. It was thanks to his lectures on Dante, held in Krakow and Lviv in 1867, and later published under the title Studies on The Divine Comedy, 1869. The article presents other opinions of Dante scholars of the time and more or less critical reviews of the results of Kraszewski’s research.

A Study of Moral Topology: Changing Morality of the Seven Deadly Sins between Dante’s Purgatory and David Fincher’s Seven

This paper aims to show that the spatial (or topological) rendering of moral imagination of the seven deadly sins in Dante’s Purgatory is more “open” than that of the seven deadly sins in David Fincher’s Seven, a contemporary equivalent of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This openness is apparently contrary to the appearance we generally believe our moral progress to wear. It will also be contended that the change from “open” to “closed” follows the curve of the logarithm function which can be understood in terms of the development of capitalism whose signature is a modern-day city and its allegorical representation in urban noir films.

Medieval Gardens: Body, Space, and the Allure of the Locus amoenus

In the literary tradition, the locus amoenus meaning pleasant place, is generally deployed and envisioned as a garden that is idyllic, peaceful, and safe. This place is commonly considered to be a space momentarily frozen in time creating the illusion of eternal bliss. The landscape, however, may not be as innocent as it seems as it bears underlying instances of an insidious nature. Although, for instance, the Garden of Eden is apparently an archetypal garden that is deemed to be pleasant, under the seemingly safe and peaceful surface is also a space wherein gendered bodies are tempted to fall from grace. On the other hand, spaces imbued with mystifyingly sinister aspects do not completely transform into a locus horridus (“fearful place”) their functions go beyond being a simple locus amoenus. This becomes even more evident when we reflect on the placement and/or displacement of bodies within these spaces. By exploring the gardens in canonical medieval narratives, such as Dante’s Divine Comedy, Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls and the Merchant’s Tale, this article analyses the various functions of the locus amoenus with a specific focus on how certain bodies are perceived within these spaces through the lens of spatial theories.

Literatura e direitos humanos em É isto um homem?, de Primo Levi

A proposta deste artigo é discutir as relações entre literatura e direitos humanos a partir das ideias de Antonio Candido, no texto O direito à literatura, e da obra de Primo Levi, É isto um homem?, publicada como testemunho da experiência nos campos de concentração durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial. A análise, em um primeiro momento, concentra-se na presença do texto literário, mais especificamente a Divina Comédia de Dante Alighieri, na recordação do prisioneiro italiano, de modo a compreender a força humanizadora da literatura que se impõe como fundamental ainda em tempos sombrios. Nesse sentido, não apenas o conteúdo do discurso, mas também a forma engendrada pelo poeta, são vistos como significativos no processo de humanização colocado em marcha pela literatura. A seguir é tratada a questão da promoção dos direitos humanos pela obra literária do próprio Levi, que denuncia os horrores aos quais milhares de homens foram submetidos, em uma tentativa de impedir que fatos como esse se repitam nas gerações futuras.

Books: Out of the Woods: A Journey Through Depression and Anxiety: Through the Woods.

Brent Williams and Korkut Oztekin Educational Resources Ltd , 2017 , HB, 160 pp, £19.95 , 978-0473390068 Starting with a quote from Dante’s The Divine Comedy that sets the theme and lends the book both its title and central metaphor, Brent Williams’s graphic novel Out of the Woods describes his journey through depression and anxiety, and back to health, illustrated wonderfully by Korkut Oztekin’s masterful draftsmanship. In middle age, the author, a community lawyer and filmmaker, unexpectedly finds himself in a deep depression. It takes some convincing from …

Continued relevance of Dante Alighieri’s Comedy that transformed the soul and the culture

The following essay is a modified version of an invited presentation given in Florence, Italy in May 2017. It builds on and extends some of the previous psychoanalytic and multidisciplinary studies of Dante’s Divine Comedy as a “psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages” that greatly contributed to the incipient changes of the cultural episteme. The paper will explore and elaborate the continued relevance of Dantian proto-psychoanalytic insight into the complex role of regression, destruction, transgression, and conflict in generating growth, expansion, and creativity, and the ways in which ethics and erotics intertwine in a complex path towards unity, within the context of his multivocal presubjective, intrasubjective, and intersubjective inquiry leading to psychic reorganization. The liminal nature of Dante’s poetry, extending the symbolic and representational range in a way unprecedented in the vernacular literature of his time, vivifying and representing what is traditionally thought of as beyond representation, will also be considered in terms of its relevance to the contemporary psychoanalytic discourse.

Misleading Simplicity: 'The Great Divorce' and the 'Divine Comedy'

Dante’s Comedy is famous, or should we say notorious, for being ‘difficult’, so thoroughly medieval as to be irrelevant for current readers. Most of this is a misapprehension based on the first canticle, Inferno, which few have actually read. Purgatorio and Paradiso are almost never mentioned. With The Great Divorce CS Lewis has taken the Divine Comedy and reworked it, yet still retaining the gravitas and much of the colour. This is a deceptively simple, easy to read work, but it carries a significant punch if carefully studied. For Lewis, the common human sin is not exciting – say, murder or hatred - but ‘accidia’; hell is a featureless grey expanse, and heaven is not easily gained, though we are all invited. All of this is modelled on the Comedy: as in the Comedy, what is easy is not what is valuable, and the struggle of a soul to rise above itself (and the many more who do not even try) is a memorable re-positioning of Dante’s great fable. In the Great Divorce CS Lewis is a master story-teller: we underestimate him at our peril.

The Multimodal Evocation of Minds in Audio Drama

This article discusses the construction of fictional minds in audio drama. Drawing upon social semiotics, cognitive narratology, and the narratology of audio drama, it starts from the premise that a character's consciousness in radio plays is shaped by the conventions, constraints, and affordances of the medium. This means that the semiotic modes of the radio play are exploited in a particular way to give listeners the impression that they are accessing a character's mind, e.g. through a voice's pitch or the verbal rendering of thoughts. In a dynamics of remediation, audio drama conventionally adopts narrative strategies associated with drama (e.g., soliloquy) as well as novelistic (e.g., thought report by a heterodiegetic narrator) and cinematic procedures (e.g., extradiegetic music as an accompaniment to characters' emotions) to evoke minds. Three adaptations will serve to illustrate this dynamics: Madame Bovary (PBS, 1986), Oeroeg (2009) and The Divine Comedy (BBC, 2014). By taking imported conventions into account alongside the audiophonic deployment of voice, music, sound, silence, and words, the article aims to further our understanding of minds in audio drama – which is relatively unknown territory in narratology – and contribute to the debate on fictional minds in cognitive and transmedial narratology.