Poetics of Redemption: Dante's Divine Comedy

by Andreas Kablitz

Overview

The essays on Dante collected in this volume interpret his Commedia as the attempt of a renewal of the Christian work of salvation by means of literature. In the view of his author, the sacro poema responds to a historical moment of extreme danger, in which nothing less than the redemption of mankind is at stake. The degradation of the medieval Roman Empire and the rise of an early capitalism in his birth town Florence, entailing a pernicious moral depravation for Dante, are to him nothing else but a variety of symptoms of the backfall of the world into its state prior to its salvation by the incarnation of Christ.

Dante presents his journey into the other world as an endeavor to escape these risks. Mobilizing the traditional procedures of literary discourse for this purpose, he aims at writing a text that overcomes the deficiencies of the traditional Book of Revelation that, on its own terms, no longer seems capable of fulfilling his traditional tasks. The immense revaluation of poetry implied in Dante’s Commedia, thus, contemporarily involves the claim of a substantial weakness of the institutional religious discourse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9783111088907
Publisher:	De Gruyter
Publication date:	12/19/2022
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.06(h) x (d)

About the Author

Andreas Kablitz, Universityät zu Köln / Petrarca-Institut, Köln.

Andreas Kablitz, Cologne University/ Petrarca-Institut, Cologne, Germany.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Lecturae Dantis: Reflections of the Ulysses Canto (Inferno XXVI) in Contemporary Scholarly Praxis and in Modern Research 1

Art in the Afterlife or God as Scupltor: The Reliefs in Dante's Purgotorio (Purg. X-XII) 35

Videre - Invidere: The Phenomenology of Perception and the Ontology of Purgatory (Purg. XIII) 79

Temporality and Eternity in Dante's Purgatorio: The Valley of the Princes at the Foot of Mount Purgatory (Purg. VII-VIII) 119

The End of the Sacrum Imperium: From Dante to Petrarch: The Evolution of the Representation of History 161

Poetics of Knowledge in the Paradiso (Paradiso XXVII and XXX) 211

List of Original Publications 231

Bibliography 233