Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Diana Puntar, “Less Than Day, or Night” (2007)

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“Less Than Day, Or Night, my recent sculptural installation at PS1 Contemporary Art Center, continues to explore what I call ‘homemade futurism.’ The piece is inspired by the final cantos of Dante’s Inferno in which Dante, led by Virgil, enters the freezing central pit of hell. At the end, as the pair climb their way out, Dante believes he is descending and becomes disoriented as they reach the top. Like many of us, he is fundamentally confused about the orientation of the world. I find it comforting to know that this kind of basic uncertainty has been with us for centuries.” [. . .]    –Diana Puntar, NY Arts Magazine

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

“Dante’s Inferno” EA Video Game

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“EA introduces an all new original property from the studio behind the hit horror game, Dead Space. The game is based on part one of the medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, commonly referred to as Dante’s Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. The dark fiction gave birth to the Tuscan Italian dialect and is widely considered the work that has defined the western world’s contemporary conception of hell and purgatory. The poem tells the tale of Dante who journeys through the twisted, menacing nine circles of hell in pursuit of his beloved Beatrice. Written in the 14th Century, The Divine Comedy, unlike the bible, was published and read aloud in the language of the Italian people, thereby making the poem accessible to the mass public. The poem delivers a striking and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife and the punishments of hell. In part one, known as Dante’s Inferno, Dante traverses all nine circles of hell; limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery.”    —EA Games

See Also:

Video Interviews and Previews at EA Games
Contributed by Chelsea Mikulencak (UTexas-Austin, ’10)

“EA Sends Players to Hell in Epic Action Game Dante’s Inferno” by El Mundo Tech, December 15, 2008
Contributed by J. Patrick Brown (Bowdoin, ’08)

“Video Game Draws Interest in Hollywood” by David Itzkoff, The New York Times, November 3, 2008

“Endpaper — Fiction Reaches a New Level” by Tim Martin, The Telegraph, May 7, 2009
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)

“Fighting Desire in Dante’s Inferno. Try not to succumb to your lustful urges in Hell.” by Jeff Haynes, IGN.com, September 21, 2009
Contributed by Charlie Russell-Schlesinger (Bowdoin, ’08)

“Dante’s Inferno Story Trailer” by Euro Gamer, November 17, 2009
Contributed by Luke Welch (Bowdoin, ’08)

“You Read It in Class; Now You Can Play It on your Console” by Seth Schiesel, The New York Times, February 8, 2010

“Charting Dante’s Descent Through 9 Circles of Hell” by Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, March 26, 2010

“Abandon All Poetry, but Enter Hell With an Attitude” by David Itzkoff, The New York Times, January 29, 2010

“Profs Guy Raffa and Arielle Saiber on EA’s ‘Dante’s Inferno’ Videogame” in The Atlantic, February 26, 2010 and “Prof. Arielle Saiber on the Game” in Future Tense, February 17, 2010

“Prof. Teodolinda Barolini on EA’s ‘Dante’s Inferno’ Videogame” in Entertainment Weekly

Review of Susan Gubar, “Judas: A Biography” (2009)

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review-of-susan-gubar-judas-a-biography-2009“In Judas: A Biography, Susan Gubar has amassed a long, grim and often nauseating catalog of the ways in which the Christian imagination has vented its wrath on the disciple who betrayed his master. . . The author of the medieval Golden Legend imagined Judas’s early life, which included killing his father and marrying his mother; an Arabic legend conjured an infant Judas obsessively biting himself. Medieval artists portrayed him as a slavering brute, deploying a racist arsenal of Jewish and African stereotypes to contrast him with the lily-white Jesus. No wonder that Dante placed Judas at the very bottom of the Inferno, where he is gnawed by Satan: ‘his head within and outside flails his legs.'” [. . .]    –Adam Kirsch, The New York Times, April 3, 2009

“Vita Nuova” and “Inferno”: a Compact Operating System for Building Cross-Platform Distributed Systems

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“People often ask where the names Plan 9, Inferno, and Vita Nuova originated.
Allegedly, Rob Pike was reading Dante’s Divine Comedy when the Computing Science Research Group at Bell Labs was working on Inferno. Inferno is named after the first book of the Divine Comedy, as are many of its components, including Dis, Styx and Limbo.
The company name Vita Nuova continues the association with Dante: his first work, a book of poetry about his childhood sweetheart Beatrice, was called La Vita Nuova. The literal translation of Vita Nuova is ‘New Life,’ which in the circumstances is surprisingly prophetic.
Plan 9 is named after the famous Ed Wood movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. There are no other connections except that the striking artwork for the products is a retro, 60s SciFi image modeled on the Plan 9 movie poster.’    —Vita Nuova

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Contributed by Kavi Montanaro

John Agard and Satoshi Kitamura, “The Young Inferno” (2008)

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john-agard-and-satoshi-kitamura-the-young-inferno-2008“A funky and powerful book. Agard takes Dante’s famous poem about a visit to Hell and reworks it to appeal to today’s youngsters, mingling 21st Century street cred with ancient mythology. Kitamura’s stylized black and white illustrations draw the reader effortlessly in.” [. . .]    —Amazon

Contributed by Virginia Jewiss (Humanities Program, Yale University)

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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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