Custom birthday cake made by Heather Frost Hughes (Head Pastry Chef and General Manager, DeLuxe Bakery) and Mary Simmons of Iowa City.
Contributed by Daniel Christian
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Custom birthday cake made by Heather Frost Hughes (Head Pastry Chef and General Manager, DeLuxe Bakery) and Mary Simmons of Iowa City.
Contributed by Daniel Christian
“So the biographer must ultimately choose: Either hew to the evidence and ferret out whatever rare nugget about Dante’s life remains uncovered, or surrender to the genius of the work he called his Comedìa and try to broker a fragile peace between literary interpretation and life writing.
“In a new biography timed (in its original Italian publication) to the 700th anniversary of the poet’s death in 1321 and translated fluidly by Allan Cameron, the Italian historian and novelist Alessandro Barbero chooses the first option. His vita, or life, of Dante, revisits some of the perennial riddles in Dante studies: Did the poet make it to Paris during his exile? (Barbero believes yes, contrary to most.) What was Dante’s socioeconomic class? (In Barbero’s view, higher than many think.) While still in Florence before his exile, did Dante conceive the project that would later become his Comedy? (Perhaps so, Barbero argues, once again against the grain.)
“We can be grateful to Barbero for this richly informative biography of a man who can seem so reticent and aloof that at times it feels as if he’s hiding behind the 14,233 verses of “The Divine Comedy” rather than revealing himself. But for those who are looking to learn more about the Dante in us, a biography has to do more than deliver the plausible facts. And so the quest for a vita of Dante in English will likely lead us right back to where Emerson suggested: the poetry from Dante’s own hand.” [. . .] — Joseph Luzzi, The New York Times, January 4, 2022 (retrieved January 17, 2022)
See our other post relating to Barbero and the 700th Anniversary here.
“To mark the occasion of the 700th anniversary of the death of Italian poet and philosopher Dante Alighieri (1265–321) the Kupferstichkabinett is showing selections from two woodcut series from the 1920s.
“The series are by the Danish artist Ebba Holm and the German Klaus Wrage. Both deal in multifaceted ways with Dante’s literary magnum opus The Divine Comedy – and thereby with his virtual journey through Hell, up the Purgatorial mountain and on to Paradise.
“Not only will additional works by Odilon Redon, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Willy Jaeckel be on display, but also coloured computer drawings by Berlin artist Andreas Siekmann (born in 1961) from his 94-part complex Die Exklusive – Zur Politik des ausgeschlossenen Vierten (The Exclusive – On the Politics of the Excluded Fourth) (2002–2011). In several series from Die Exklusive Siekmann depicts particularly contemporary journeys to Hell undertaken by Dante and his guide, the poet Virgil.” [. . .] —Staatliche Museen zu Berlin
The exhibition will be open from February 12, 2022 to May 8, 2022.
See also: the Kupferstichkabinett gallery webpage, linked here.
See our posts on Klaus Wrage here.
“…A copy of the entire Divine Comedy, micro-inscribed on sheets of a titanium and gold alloy, will be sent up into space and left there to float in the heavens among the stars that Dante wrote about.
The last word in each of the three parts is ‘stelle’ (stars), including the famous final line which defines God as ‘The love that moves the sun and the other stars.’
For the space project, two sheets measuring about 29 cm by 43 cm (11 X 17 inches) and folded in four, accordion style, will each be inscribed with the entire poem of some 14,200 lines containing about 32,000 words.” –Phillip Pullella, Reuters, June 10, 2021
“Katherine Powlesland’s new book Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which will be Italian Perspectives 53, brings an entirely new angle to Dante studies. This is a bold claim, given that Dante studies is enjoying its 700th anniversary this year, but Katherine is bringing to bear theories from cognitive neuroscience and from the critical study of videogames, so I think we can be fairly sure that the medieval scholiasts did not get there before her. But there is a certain affinity between the desire of modern game writers, and the desire of 13th-century epic poets, to enmesh their readers in a participatory experience.
“An immersive game today, or a text like the Divine Comedy or the Roman de la Rose, very much want the reader to experience for herself: to be in that wood, to find her way around that wall, to look into that mirror-like pool with her own eyes. Katherine sees both media as governed by mechanics of narrative participation.” [. . .] –“Bringing Video Game Theory to Dante,” Modern Humanities Research Association, June 27, 2021
The book will be released in 2022. See more information about it, in particular a discussion of its cover art, here.
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.