Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
In the TV Series Community Episode 12 of Season 5, “Basic Story,” an insurance appraiser goes to Greendale Community College to determine the value of the school. The appraiser climbs the first step of the school’s stairs and recites Paradiso XVII, 58-60.
Contributed by Chiara Montera (University of Pittsburgh ’21)
Trump 2020 is an online 3D video game built by Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC), a project of Andi Cox. Players descend through the 9 Circles of Hell, to learn of the nature of wrong-doing and its consequences.
“From time to time I will be offering examples of encounters with images from poetry. The point is to show what we might learn from the poets about how to better engage with images in our dreams.
“In the opening of Canto III of Inferno, ‘Dante’ and ‘Virgil’ stand before the gates of hell. The first nine lines are in capital letters.
PER ME SI VA NELLA CITTÀ DOLENTE
THROUGH ME ONE ENTERS THE CITY OF WOE..
“The gate itself is speaking to the poets (and to us the readers).
“This gate has spoken to me for 47 years, since I took the Italian to heart–memorized the lines in a language I do not really know. But I loved Dante and loved the sound, and I think part of the beauty of reading in a foreign language is you slow down, you don’t read it like you read the newspaper or the internet, you take time to translate the words and feel them.
“There is another language that has become foreign for too many of us, the language of images. We have forgotten how to read images, how to respond to them. To gain benefit from our dreams, we must learn how to stand before the images.
“I believe reading poetry written at a high level can teach us how to do this. That is what I hope to show in this series.” […] –Rodger Kamenetz, Encountering Images, Series 1: Dante at the Gates of Hell, December 23, 2020
The Radio branch of Italian Rai 3, offers a podcast exploration of Dante’s knowledge of science (called “natural philosophy” in his time) and how excellent a science writer he was, and how effectively he communicated scientific ideas in his works. (In Italian)
“Conosciamo Dante Alighieri come raffinato poeta, teorico della politica, esperto di linguistica, scrittore e filosofo. Ma forse molti si sorprenderebbero se lo definissimo anche come un grande divulgatore scientifico. In effetti le sue opere trattano molte questioni di filosofia naturale, che spaziano dalla cosmologia alla geografia, dall’ottica alla geometria. Ma Dante, da assertore di un’idea di accesso universale al sapere, tratta questi temi rivolgendosi non solo ai dotti del suo tempo, ma anche ad una platea più ampia. Lo sottolineava Pietro Greco in uno dei suoi ultimi libri, Homo. Arte e scienza (Di Renzo, 2020), e ce lo ricorda oggi lo storico della scienza Gaspare Polizzi, dell’università di Pisa. Non solo: le sue concezioni cosmologiche sono di una sorprendente modernità, come ritiene Marco Bersanelli, astrofisico all’università statale di Milano, e autore di Il grande spettacolo del cielo (Sperling e Kupfer, 2016).” —Rai Play Radio, Radio 3 scienza, March 25, 2021
Contributed by Carmelo Giunta
Contributed by Alexander Bertland
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.
