Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“In the year or so since I started blogging, I’ve found myself ingrained into a number of internet communities which will here remain unnamed. But I have stumbled a cross an unwritten set of rules governing these communities, and someone took these general principles and fashioned them into this handy ‘Dante’s Inferno’ type chart.” […] -Paul Tassi, Unreality Magazine, February 18, 2010
Contributed by Victoria Rea-Wilson (Bowdoin, ’14)
One of the Magliozzi brothers says, “And even though Dante says ‘OK, make it 10 circles!’ whenever he hears us say it, this is NPR, National Public Radio.” –Episode 0945, “Good News! It’s Going to Cost a Fortune!”, Car Talk, November 7, 2009
http://www.cartalk.com/ct/review/show.jsp?showid=200945 (retrieved December 29, 2009)
Contributed by Alex Bertland (Niagara University)
“The First Circle concerns worker-prisoners in the Soviet Gulag who are critically needed intelligence workers – mostly scientists and researchers. These intellectuals are, relatively speaking, the lucky ones. They live and work in an urban complex, and face little in the way of physical privation, regularly fed and decently clothed. They are the residents of the first circle of hell, with Solzhenitsyn explicitly comparing the Soviet dystopia to Dante’s Inferno. The novel haunts us with the awareness that far, far worse was taking place elsewhere. As a prisoner headed for the Gulag observes, with terrifying accuracy, at the end of the novel: ‘We are going into hell now. We are returning to hell. The sharashka is the highest, the best, the first circle of hell. It was almost paradise.'” [. . .] –Saul Austerlitz, The Second Pass, August 4, 2009
“Of course, the subtitle of Sarah Palin’s book is ‘An American Life.’ Because she is the lovely avatar of real Americans — ordinary, hard-working, God-fearing, common-sense, good, ordinary, real Americans. If you are not living an American life, you are, to use a Palin coinage, living ‘bass-ackwards.’. . .
I approached reading her book with trepidation, worried I might learn that I am not a real American, dang it, just another dreaded, jaded ‘enlightened elite.’
I was born and live in Washington, D.C., after all. Now you’d think that this would be a rather patriotic city to call home, but Palin paints it as a cross between Sodom and Dante’s Fifth Circle.” [. . .] –Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, November 17, 2009
“. . .The Gift of Thanks is a scholarly, many-angled examination of what gratitude is and how it functions in our lives. Gratitude is a moral emotion of sorts, Ms. Visser writes, one that is more complicated and more vital than we think. Ms. Visser acknowledges that simple politeness is the grease that keeps society running and, conversely, how much hostility can build up among people when words like ‘thanks’ are not spoken.
In Dante’s Inferno, she observes, ‘at the bottommost circle of hell, the ungrateful are punished by being eternally frozen in the postures of deference they had failed to perform during their lifetimes: trapped rigid in enveloping ice, they stand erect or upside down, lie prone, or bow face to feet.’
In The Gift of Thanks, however, Ms. Visser is most interested in the kind of gratitude that is not compulsory or self-interested. She writes about the humility required to be genuinely grateful, and the essential ability to climb out of one’s own head.” [. . .] –Dwight Garner, The New York Times, November 17, 2009
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.
