Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Begins with a reference to Bertran de Born. One of the protagonists has the last name Born, and Bertran comes up a few times: both as Dante depicted him and as the poet himself. The narrator also translates one of Bertran’s poems from Occitan into English (Auster includes the whole poem).
Contributed by Elizabeth Ann Coggeshall
“You’ll actually have one more story to climb once you arrive in the elevator lobby, where you can take a tri-level stairway adorned with some very fitting text from the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first staircase is from Inferno (Hell), the second from Puragtorio (Purgatory), and the final from Paradiso (Heaven).” […] —Brew York, May 25, 2011
“Lynda Gardner, Saundra Duncan, and Deborah Ranger will give a reading of a new play at a Harvard University conference next week. A different kind of alma mater qualifies them for this appearance: York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Conn., a high-security state facility for female offenders.
“While behind bars at York, all three joined theater workshops with Wesleyan University professor Ron Jenkins and students from his Activism and Outreach Through Theater course. They got to know Shakespeare and Dante, and it changed their lives.
“‘I spent my first six months [in York] trying to figure out ways to kill myself, and the next four and a half years trying to see how much more I can live,’ says Gardner.
“Inspired by these three and other inmates he worked with, Jenkins wrote a play about their existence behind bars, ‘To See the Stars,’ which mingles inmates’ stories with bits of Dante’s epic 14th-century poem, Divine Comedy.
“The women have their own perspective on ‘Divine Comedy.’ They tend to say that they are still working on its third part (Paradise) but that they are well versed in the first two (Hell and Purgatory).
“‘I’ve been in a lot of the circles of hell,’ says Gardner, 63. ‘It really isn’t about hell; it is about hope. Climbing out of those circles.’
“The trio will perform ‘To See the Stars’ on March 3 in a lightly staged reading at a Harvard conference on race, class, and education called Disrupting the Discourse: Discussing the ‘Undiscussable,’ sponsored by the Graduate School of Education’s Alumni of Color. The Harvard performance is open to conference participants only, but the public can attend a free performance at Brown University’s Lyman Hall in Providence on March 2 at 3:30 p.m.” — Joel Brown, Boston.com, February 12, 2012 (retrieved on July 9, 2012)
“. . .His first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is about many things — the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post-collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism — but at its center it’s a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.
‘When we are inspired,’ the British psychologist Adam Phillips has observed, ‘rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.’ Just ask Dante. Or Charlie Blakeman, Beha’s 28-year-old novelist narrator. When first met, Charlie is renting a room from the uncle of a college acquaintance in a town house on Washington Square. He has published a novel that almost nobody noticed and the future of his writing career looks bleak. Enter — or make that re-enter — Sophie Wilder, the wise (Sophie), wild (Wilder) love of his life, whom he first encountered almost a decade earlier in a freshman writing workshop.” [. . .] –Sarah Towers, The New York Times, June 29, 2012
Heck: Where Bad Kids Go is a series of books that seems to have drawn heavy inspiration from Dante’s Inferno. After the first installment in the series, each subsequent book is focused on a specific “circle of Heck.” The characters’ names seem to draw inspiration from different sources of “infernal” literature – more specifically, Dante, Milton, and Goethe: Virgil, Milton, and Fauster, for example. At one point in the series, the protagonists have to cross “the great tunnel of dung-the River Styx, the final, fecal resting place of all the world’s sewage.”
Contributed by Gianluca P., 4th grade
All submissions will be considered for posting. Bibliographic references and scholarly essays are also welcome for consideration.
Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.
