Why Dante Matters: An Intelligent Person's Guide

by John Took

Overview

John Took provides an accessible and entirely original view of one of the most important poets and thinkers in all of Western literature, Dante Alighieri.

Dante is the poet that everyone knows of yet also knows little about. And yet he was probably the most important and powerful poet that the Western world has ever produced. There are many translations of his work in English, but of Dante himself, most people only know about his love object Beatrice, that he was exiled from Florence and that he wrote The Divine Comedy—but maybe little else.

In his Intelligent Person's Guide, Professor John Took introduces the reader to the principle themes of Dante's work: the polarities of existence, time and eternity, freedom and destiny, individuality and existence, the multiplicity of human loving. It is by self-confrontation and self-transcendence that we come to understand our human journey through hell, purgatory and on to paradise. These ostensibly somewhat complex ideas are here explained by John Took with pellucid clarity. In the course of this book we are caught up by the imaginative excitement in this study of a poetic genius which we cannot fail to be drawn into ourselves, and to find infectious.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472951038
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	12/15/2020
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,095,010
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

John Took is Professor Emeritus of Dante Studies at University College London. Prominent among his books and articles on Dante – many of them turning on the poet's significance as a leading representative of what Paul Tillich calls the 'existentialist point of view' in philosophy and theology – is his recently published intellectual biography of Dante entitled simply Dante (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ix

Preface: Preliminary Confession x

Introduction: Dante and the Existential Point of View 1

Dante at the Point of Ultimate Concern 1

Dante: Who, What, Where and When? 2

Course of the Argument 13

1 Dante, Self and Selfhood 17

Love-Procession and the Love-Imperative: Preliminary Considerations in the Areas of Theology and Ethics 17

Patterns of Self-Relatedness: Being as Ahead of Self, as Away from Self and Alongside Self 30

A Phenomenology of Being 54

2 The Vita Nova 63

Preliminary Considerations: New Life and a New Book 63

Love and Love-Understanding: The Pilgrim Way 66

A Commedia a minore 90

3 The Convivio 97

Far-Wandering and Friendship: The Courage of the Convivio 97

Feasting and Faring Well: A Guide FOR the Dispossessed 101

Problems of Perspective and a Civic Ontology 139

4 The Commedia 147

Preliminary Considerations: Spiritual Journeying and the Courage to Be 147

A Song of Ascents: The Commedia à la lettre 148

Journeying under the Aspect of Seeing (Inferno) 154

Journeying under the Aspect of Striving (Purgatorio) 161

Journeying under the Aspect of Surpassing (Paradiso) 169

5 The Power of the Word: Issues in the Area of Language and Literature 175

Being, Becoming and the Sanctity of the Word 175

The Triumph of the Image and a Writerly Text 187

Conclusion: In Conversation with Dante 199

Further Reading 201

Index of Names 205