ENGLISH

The Undivine Comedy

By Teodolinda Barolini

Book information

Publisher
Princeton University Press
Year
1992
ISBN
0691069530, 9780691069531, 9781400810918
LCC
PQ4416 .B37 1992
Open Library ID
OL1710012M
Language
english
Format
PDF
Filesize
2 MB (1637546 bytes)
Pages
368\368
Scanned
yes
Time added
2010-06-26 00:49:36

Description

Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.

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