Manuele Gragnolati

This volume takes Dante's rich and multifaceted discourse of desire, from the Vita Nova to the Commedia, as a point of departure in investigating medieval concepts of desire in all their multiplicity, fragmentation and interrelation. As well as offering several original contributions on this fundamental aspect of Dante's work, it seeks to situate the Florentine more effectively within the broader spectrum of medieval culture and to establish greater intellectual exchange between Dante scholars and those from other disciplines. The volume is also notable for its openness to diverse critical and methodological approaches. In considering the extent to which modern theoretical paradigms can be used to shed light upon the Middle Ages, it will interest those engaged with questions of critical theory as well as medieval culture.

Desire in Dante and the Middle Ages

Almut Suerbaum

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars. It spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and songs, and it brings together studies on the character of ‛voice’ in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.

Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture

Christoph F. E. Holzhey

Luca Di Blasi

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was both a writer and filmmaker deeply rooted in European culture, as well as an intellectual who moved between different traditions, identities and positions. Early on he looked to Africa and Asia for possible alternatives to the hegemony of Western Neocapitalism and Consumerism, and in his hands the Greek and Judeo-Christian Classics morphed into unsettling multistable figures constantly shifting between West and East, North and South, the present and the past, rationality and myth, identity and otherness. The contributions in this volume, which belong to different intellectual and disciplinary fields, are bound together by a fascination for Pasolini's ability to recognize contradictions, to intensify and multiply them, as well as to make them aesthetically and politically productive. What emerges is a "euro-eccentric" and multifaceted Pasolini of great interest for the present.

Pasolini's Multistable Subjectivities, Geographies, Traditions

The Scandal of Self-contradiction

Dante Alighieri

Rime giovanili e della Vita nuova

Experiencing the Afterlife provides the first sustained analysis of popular, vernacular depictions of the afterlife written in Italy before the Divine Comedy by authors such as Uguccione da Lodi, Giacomino da Verona, and Bonvesin da la Riva. Manuele Gragnolati uses his readings of these poets to provide a new interpretation of Dante's work. Combining elements from several disciplines, he investigates the richness of high medieval eschatology and the concept of personal identity it expresses. Gragnolati is particularly concerned with how the notions of body and pain characteristic of medieval spirituality and devotion inform the eschatological representations of the time, especially in their paradoxical urge to stress at once the physical experience of the separated soul and the final necessity of bodily resurrection. By integrating lesser-known texts and scholarship from other disciplines into the specialized field of Dante studies, Gragnolati sheds new light on some of the most vigorously debated and crucial questions raised by the Divine Comedy, including the embryological discourse of Purgatorio 25, the relation between the soul's experience of pain in Purgatory and the devotion that late medieval culture expressed toward Christ's suffering, and the significance of the audacious vision of resurrected bodies that Dante the pilgrim enjoys at the end of his journey. At the same time, Gragnolati brings these questions back into contemporary discussions of medieval eschatology and opens new perspectives for current and future work on embodiment and identity. Scholars and students of Dante and Italian studies, as well as those in medieval history, religion, culture, and art history, will be rewarded by the fresh insights contained in Experiencing the Afterlife.

Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture

Experiencing the Afterlife

Fabian Lampart

Fabio Camilletti

After almost seven centuries, Dante endures and even seems to haunt the present. Metamorphosing Dante explores what so many authors, artists and thinkers from varied backgrounds have found in Dante’s oeuvre, and the ways in which they have engaged with it through rewritings, dialogues, and transpositions. By establishing trans-disciplinary routes, the volume shows that, along with a corpus of multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters, and stories, Dante has provided a field of tensions in which to mirror and investigate one’s own time. Authors explored include Samuel Beckett, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, Derek Jarman, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Joyce, Wolfgang Koeppen, Jacques Lacan, Thomas Mann, James Merrill, Eugenio Montale, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cesare Pavese, Giorgio Pressburger, Robert Rauschenberg, Vittorio Sereni, Virginia Woolf.

Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Metamorphosing Dante

Sara Fortuna

"The symposium on Elsa Morante at which the essays contained in this volume were first presented took place on 11-12 April 2008 at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) ... " -- Acknowledgments, p. [ix].

Elsa Morante's Aracoeli

The Power of Disturbance

Elena Lombardi

Francesca Southerden

Full Professor of Medieval Italian Literature Manuele Gragnolati

Professor of Italian Literature and Paget Toynbee Fellow Elena Lombardi

The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It encompasses diverse approaches and spans several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, literary theory, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante

How can the power of wholes be resisted without essentializing their parts? Drawing on different archives and methodologies, including aesthetics, history, biology, affect, race, and queer, the interventions in this volume explore different ways of troubling the consistency and stability of wholes, breaking up their closure and making them more dynamic. Doing so without necessarily presupposing or producing parts, an outside, or a teleological development, they indicate the critical potential of partiality without parts.

Towards Partiality Without Parts

De/Constituting Wholes

The volume assesses performative structures within a variety of medieval forms of textuality, from vernacular literature to records of parliamentary proceedings, from prayer books to musical composition. Three issues are central to the volume: the role of ritual speech acts; the way in which authorship can be seen as created within medieval texts rather than as a given category; finally, phenomena of voice, created and situated between citation and repetition, especially in forms which appropriate and transform literary tradition. The volume encompasses articles by historians and musicologists as well as literary scholars, it spans European literature from the West (French, German, Italian) to the East (Church Slavonic), vernacular and Latin; it contrasts modes of liturgical meditation in the Western and Eastern Church with secular plays and song, and it brings together studies on the character of `voice' in major medieval authors such as Dante with examples of Dante-reception in the early twentieth century.

The Oxford Handbook of Dante contains forty-four specially written chapters that provide a thorough and creative reading of Dante's oeuvre. It gathers an intergenerational and international team of scholars encompassing diverse approaches from the fields of Anglo-American, Italian, and continental scholarship and spanning several disciplines: philology, material culture, history, religion, art history, visual studies, theory from the classical to the contemporary, queer, post- and de-colonial, and feminist studies. The volume combines a rigorous reassessment of Dante's formation, themes, and sources, with a theoretically up-to-date focus on textuality, thereby offering a new critical Dante. The volume is divided into seven sections: 'Texts and Textuality'; 'Dialogues'; 'Transforming Knowledge'; Space(s) and Places'; 'A Passionate Selfhood'; 'A Non-linear Dante'; and 'Nachleben'. It seeks to challenge the Commedia-centric approach (the conviction that notwithstanding its many contradictions, Dante's works move towards the great reservoir of poetry and ideas that is the Commedia), in order to bring to light a non-teleological way in which these works relate amongst themselves. Plurality and the openness of interpretation appear as Dante's very mark, coexisting with the attempt to create an all-encompassing mastership. The Handbook suggests what is exciting about Dante now and indicate where Dante scholarship is going, or can go, in a global context.

Manuele Gragnolati

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