Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Divinity of Death by Nekromantheon

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“The debut album from Norway’s rulers of evil thrashing oldschool madness is finally re-released on all formats! Featuring members of Obliteration and Audiopain, Divinity Of Death is the perfect blend of classic Slayer, Possessed, Dark Angel, Sepultura etc. combined with Nekromantheon’s own amazing songwriting and instrumental skills. One of the strongest Norwegian debuts, recorded and produced by the band themselves in their own Kick Arse Studio for that old, necro feel!”    — Duplicate Records

The album art of their album features Gustave Doré’s, Styx-Philippo Argenti. 

Find the album here.

Find the illustration here.

Contributed by Gianluca Giuseffi Grippa. 

Funeral Diner’s The Underdark

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The screamo band Funeral Diner released the album The Underdark (2005)with its album art being one of Gustave Doré’s 1857 illustrations for Dante’s Inferno. The specific illustration is titled “The Hypocrites.”

Find The Underdark here.

View Gustave Doré’s illustrations here.

Contributed by Gianluca Giuseffi Grippa 

Laborintus II

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“Laborintus II, composed in 1965, was commissioned by the French Television to celebrate the 700th anniversary of Dante’s birth. It takes its title from the poetic collection Laborintus by Edoardo Sanguineti.
The text of Laborintus II develops certain themes from Dante’s Vita nuova, Convivio, and Divina Commedia, combining them – mainly through formal and semantic analogies – with Biblical texts and texts by T. S. Eliot, Pound and Sanguineti himself.”

“The main formal reference of Laborintus II is the catalogue, in its medieval meaning (like the Etymologies of Isodore of Seville, for instance, also appearing in Laborintus), which combines the Dantesque themes of memory, death and usury – that is, the reduction of all things to market value. Individual words and sentences are sometimes to be regarded as autonomous entities, and sometimes to be perceived as part of the sound structure as a whole.”

“The principle of the catalogue is not limited to the text: it underlies the musical structure as well. Laborintus II is a catalogue of references, attitudes and elementary instrumental techniques; a rather didactic catalogue, like a school book dealing with Dantesque visions and musical gestures. The instrumental parts are developed mainly as an extension of the vocal actions of singers and speakers, and the short section of electronic music is conceived as an extension of the instrumental actions.”

“Laborintus II is a theatre work; it can be treated as a story, an allegory, a documentary, a dance. It can be performed in a school, in a theatre, on television, in the open air, or in any other place permitting the gathering of an audience.”    –Luciano Berio

Read more about Laborintus II and Luciano Berio here.

Contributed by Gianluca Giuseffi Grippa

“Saving Pedagogy: Dante as the Poet of Education,” Scott F. Crider

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“Dante reveals to students the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. The end of a liberal education is an experience of the Love that created both the subjects of a liberal education and the human persons in need of that education, and Dante achieves that purpose. Through truth and virtue, he becomes wise, and his wisdom sets him free.”

“Without ever addressing the point explicitly with students, I can let Dante reveal to them the essence not only of their relationship to their teachers, and ours to them, but also of our combined relationship to the reality (natural, human, and divine) studied during their liberal education. Dante certainly imagined liberal education as constituted by the trivium and the quadrivium—the arts of word (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and those of number (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music)—as propaedeutic to the study of philosophy and theology, and he imagined poetry, in a work he wrote on the Italian language, De vulgari eloquentia, to be the liberal art combining the consummate art of language and the consummate art of number: ‘Poetry [is] a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music.’ For our purposes, I will hazard a tautology and say that a liberal education liberates. That is, it frees us from error into understanding of the most significant question: How should we live?”

[. . .]

“Virgil’s guidance has been necessary for Dante, but it is not sufficient. His guidance has profound limitations that make it both helpful, given where Dante was, but needing to be surpassed, given where he is going. Imperfect pedagogy, thank goodness, can still save, just not by itself. Students need more than one teacher because of the limits of the master.”

[. . .]

“The relationship between Dante and Beatrice is a suggestive representation of the tendency in pedagogic relationships to confuse the teacher for the thing taught, and to allow one’s shared love of the material to be lost in the distracting presence of the one revealing the material. Guru-ism is a perversion of a truly saving pedagogy—a distortion of a legitimate attraction. Beauty is a salvific distraction, provided the beautiful one reminds us of that which truly saves.”    — Scott F. Crider, Public Discourse, August 21, 2021

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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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