In the Footsteps of Dante
In the Footsteps of Dante

Author: Teresa Bartolomei

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-01-30

Total Pages: 252

ISBN-13: 3110796090

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Dante, the pilgrim, is the image of an author who stubbornly looks ahead, seeking and building the "Great Beyond" (Manguel). Following in his footsteps is therefore not a return to the past, going à rebours, but a commitment to the future, to exploring the potential of humanity to "transhumanise". This dynamic of self-transcendence in Dante’s humanism (Ossola), which claims for European civilisation a vocation for universalism (Ferroni), is analysed in the volume at three crucial moments: Firstly, the establishment of an emancipatory relationship between author and reader (Ascoli), in which authorship is authority and not power; secondly, the conception of vision as a learning process and horizon of eschatological overcoming (Mendonça); finally, the relationship with the past, which is never purely monumental, but ethically and intertextually dynamic, in an original rewriting of the original scriptural, medieval, and classical culture (Nasti, Bolzoni, Bartolomei). A second group of contributions is dedicated to the reconstruction of Dante’s presence in Portuguese literature (Almeida, Espírito Santo, Figueiredo, Marnoto, Vaz de Carvalho): they attest to the innovative impact of Dante’s work even in literary traditions more distant from it.

Dante’s Bones
Dante’s Bones

Author: Guy P. Raffa

Publisher: Belknap Press

Published: 2020-05-12

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674980832

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A richly detailed graveyard history of the Florentine poet whose dead body shaped Italy from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to the Risorgimento, World War I, and Mussolini’s fascist dictatorship. Dante, whose Divine Comedy gave the world its most vividly imagined story of the afterlife, endured an extraordinary afterlife of his own. Exiled in death as in life, the Florentine poet has hardly rested in peace over the centuries. Like a saint’s relics, his bones have been stolen, recovered, reburied, exhumed, examined, and, above all, worshiped. Actors in this graveyard history range from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Michelangelo, and Pope Leo X to the Franciscan friar who hid the bones, the stone mason who accidentally discovered them, and the opportunistic sculptor who accomplished what princes, popes, and politicians could not: delivering to Florence a precious relic of the native son it had banished. In Dante’s Bones, Guy Raffa narrates for the first time the complete course of the poet’s hereafter, from his death and burial in Ravenna in 1321 to a computer-generated reconstruction of his face in 2006. Dante’s posthumous adventures are inextricably tied to major historical events in Italy and its relationship to the wider world. Dante grew in stature as the contested portion of his body diminished in size from skeleton to bones, fragments, and finally dust: During the Renaissance, a political and literary hero in Florence; in the nineteenth century, the ancestral father and prophet of Italy; a nationalist symbol under fascism and amid two world wars; and finally the global icon we know today.

Dante's Divine Comedy
Dante's Divine Comedy

Author: Mark Vernon

Publisher: Angelico Press

Published: 2021-09-03

Total Pages: 515

ISBN-13: 1621387488

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Dante Alighieri was early in recognizing that our age has a problem. His hometown, Florence, was at the epicenter of the move from the medieval world to the modern. He realized that awareness of divine reality was shifting, and that if it were lost, dire consequences would follow. The Divine Comedy was born in a time of troubling transition, which is why it still speaks today. Dante's masterpiece presents a cosmic vision of reality, which he invites his readers to traverse with him. In this narrative retelling and guide, from the gates of hell, up the mountain of purgatory, to the empyrean of paradise, Mark Vernon offers a vivid introduction and interpretation of a book that, 700 years on, continues to open minds and change lives.

The Undivine Comedy
The Undivine Comedy

Author: Teodolinda Barolini

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 1992-10-30

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1400820766

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Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.

Dante's Purgatory
Dante's Purgatory

Author: Dante Alighieri

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 1981-09-22

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780253179265

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Musa's extensive annotation as well as his prose introduction to each of the cantos reveal the hand of the careful scholar and craftsman.

For the Love of Literature
For the Love of Literature

Author: Christy MacKaye Barnes

Publisher: SteinerBooks

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 9780880104166

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An unnoticed component of the present educational, social, and even ecological crises lies in the declining value given what we correctly call the "humanities." The study of the living words of great authors--Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, the Romantic poets, the Russian novelists--no longer forms the basis of the education of the human soul. The imagination is disparaged, marginalized, politicized, and devalued. Young people are instead fed a monotonous diet of information, scientism, and technology. While these are certainly important and useful--maybe even necessary to our survival--once they become the basis for educating our children, the result is an assault on what it means to be human. Built around the work of Christy MacKaye Barnes, the themes of this collection include the training of imagination, speech, and poetry, and expanding human capacities through the study of great authors. The writers include many of the great first-generation English teachers in the Waldorf movement. Contents: Part One Christy MacKaye Barnes, nine essays, including: "Can the Imagination Be Trained?" "The Crisis of the Word Today" "Why Write?" "Schooling Capacities through the Study of Great Authors" "Backgrounds for Russian Literature" Part Two Adam Bittleston, "The Future of the English Language" L. Francis Edmunds, "Literature in the Upper School" Linda Sawers, "In the Footsteps of Dante" Isabelle Wyatt, "Chaucer and the Modern Consciousness" A. C. Harwood, "Fair Mountain and Fine City" Adam Bittleston, "Shakespeare's Troubled Kings" Ursula Grahl, "In Quest of the Holy Grail" L. Francis Edmunds, "The Trials of Parsifal" Hugh Hetherington, "Grail Mountain and Garden of Marvels" Eileen Hutchins, "Wolfram and Wagner" Adam Bittleston, "Christopher Fry and the Riddle of Evil" Susan Demanett, "Questing toward a True Understanding of Grammar" Dorit Winter, "We Love Grammar" This collection is essential for anyone interested in the Waldorf curriculum and in restoring a real study of literature for young people.