Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Elisabeth Tonnard, “In This Dark Wood” (2008)

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“This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s).
The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts.”    —Elisabeth Tonnard

Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas – Austin)

Joan Jonas, “Reading Dante” (2009)

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“One of the highlights of Performa 09 is Joan Jonas’s “Reading Dante II,” which began its five-night run (with one matinee) at the Performing Garage Tuesday night. It amounts to a 60-minute multimedia collage in the round with moving parts and a smorgasbord of audio accompaniment. This includes music, loud crashes, traffic noises, and voices reading fragments of the work’s inspiration: the Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso of Dante’s Divine Comedy.” [. . .]    –Roberta Smith, The New York Times, November 11, 2009

See also Joan Jonas on Dante in Artforum and in Performa: The Performing Garage

Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)

“New Rivals Pose Threat to New York Stock Exchange”

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new-rivals-pose-threat-to-new-york-stock-exchange“For most of the 217 years since its founding under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street, the New York Stock Exchange was the high temple of American capitalism. Behind its Greco-Roman facade, traders raised a Dante-esque din in their pursuit of the almighty dollar. Good times or bad, the daily melee on the cavernous trading floor made the Big Board the greatest marketplace for stocks in the world.” [. . .]    –Graham Bowley, The New York Times, October 14, 2009

“The Devil Wears Crocs”

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the-devil-wears-crocs“With modern presidencies, we have to watch the poignant tableau of such leaders realizing that they have squandered their chance for greatness even as they suffer the indignity of rejection by those who once sought their blessing.
These painful periods for W. and Bill Clinton, falling low after starting with such grand hopes, are recounted in two new books. . .
The pen-and-tell by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, ‘Speech-less,’ is being denounced by some former Bushies and Republican commentators as a ‘Devil Wears Prada’ betrayal. (Except, in this case, the Devil wears Crocs. Preparing to make a prime-time address explaining why the 2008 economic bailout wasn’t socialism–‘We got to make this understandable for the average cat,’ the president tells his speechwriters–W. pads around the White House in Crocs, an image that’s hard to get out of your head.)
‘The guy is a worm,’ Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer about Latimer, adding: ‘He needs to read his Dante. He probably hasn’t read The Inferno. The lowest circles of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal, and at the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies.'” [. . .]    –Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, September 26, 2009

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How to Cite

Coggeshall, Elizabeth, and Arielle Saiber, eds. Dante Today: Citings and Sightings of Dante’s Works in Contemporary Culture. Website. Access date.

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