Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Junji Ito’s Horror Manga Uzumaki (1998-1999)

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uzumaki-horror-manga-panel“Uzumaki is the story of Kirie Goshima, a young girl living in a coastal town that is slowly falling into the grip of a ‘spiral curse.’ The townsfolk, to varying degrees, become obsessed and subsequently infected by spirals.

“Ito-san’s spirals operate with similar symbolic significance to the circles of hell, namely, they are partly allegorical, as well as literal, of the spirals and endless cycles of human behavior…as in Dante’s hell all things become literal, he is physically twisted to reflect his psychological reality. Each person in Uzumaki is trapped in their own sin.

“Junji Ito understands, as Dante did, that even positive emotions like love have a place in hell when they are taken to extremes. Like a spiral itself, the story circles whilst drawing ever closer to a central point…like Dante, Junji Ito doesn’t flinch from showing us the full expanse and architecture of the hell he has created, and we see the very “nadir” or low-point of the spiral, and what that represents.” [. . .]    –Joseph Sale, The English Cantos, April 8, 2020 (retrieved October 27, 2021)

Patch Adams (1998)

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“Or as the poet Dante put it, ‘In the middle of the journey of my life, I found myself in a dark wood, for I had lost the right path.’ Eventually I would find the right path, but in the most unlikely place.”    –Robin Williams as Hunter “Patch” Adams, Patch Adams (1998)

See IMDb for more about the film by Tom Shadyac.

What Dante did with Loss by Jan Conn

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“What Dante Did With Loss is Jan Conn’s fourth book of poems. Central to this powerful new collection is a suite of poems charting the explosive emotions surrounding her mother’s suicide. Other poems range from meditations on South American flora and fauna to postmodern encounters with immortality.

“Jan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and works as a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on mosquitoes, their evolution and ecology. She has published seven previous books of poetry.”    —Véhicule Press, 1998.

You can purchase Conn’s book of poetry through Véhicule Press or through Amazon.

What Dreams May Come, 1998

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What Dreams May ComeVincent Ward’s 1998 film, What Dreams May Come, starring Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra, explores the after-life. The film’s protagonist, Chris Neilson, finds himself in heaven after death. His wife, Annie, has committed suicide and resides in hell; when Chris sets out to find her, he travels through a representation of the first seven circles of Dante’s Inferno.

Barlowe’s Inferno (1998)

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Wayne Barlowe‘s Barlowe’s Inferno is a book of images of hell.

“Best-selling science fiction and fantasy artist Wayne Barlowe abandons his popular illustrative style and adopts a classic painterly technique in these images of Hell’s structures, iconographies, and inhabitants. In ‘Barlowe’s Hell,’ he incorporates the visual myths from many religions to present a chilling and beautiful collection of carefully researched and rendered artwork whose bizarre images contain symbolic references to age-old beliefs and practices.”    —Amazon

Barlowe's Inferno

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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