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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Mommy’s Inferno, from Scary Mommy

May 12, 2022 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

scary-mommys-inferno

“In his poem Inferno, Dante travels through nine separate circles of human suffering on his journey towards spiritual salvation. Now I’m no major Italian poet, nor am I on a quest to save my soul, allegorically or spiritually. In fact, I haven’t even read Inferno, which is part of the epic poem the Divine Comedy, since the first time I trudged through (parts of) it in college, but I am a Mommy of three little kids. I have learned that motherhood is both divine and, often, a comedy….and yes, there is suffering. Hoo-boy is there suffering. I think, had Dante been a Mommy, his Nine Circles of Hell may have looked a bit different…but no less dreadful.

[. . .]

“Dante had to figuratively travel through hell and back before enjoying the peace that came at the end of his journey. I guess that’s the point of Mommy’s Inferno….that the inescapable moments of suffering we endure as mommies makes us stronger, better equipped to handle the challenges that come next, and more ready to enjoy the light of the good days that always follow the darkest nights of motherhood.

“So don’t ‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter’ motherhood; for, though the hours and days of motherhood be long, the years are short…or so I hear.”   –Sarah Harris, “Mommy’s Inferno,” Scary Mommy (published May 21, 2010; updated December 2, 2020)

Read the nine circles of Scary Mommy’s Inferno here.

Categories: Digital Media, Written Word
Tagged with: 2010, 2020, Abandon All Hope, Blogs, Circles of Hell, Hell, Inferno, Moms, Motherhood, Parenting, Suffering

Limbo (Playdead, 2010)

May 26, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Limbo is a 2010 puzzle-platform video game developed by independent game developer Playdead.

In a presentation at the 2021 Middle Ages in Modern Games Twitter conference scholar Claudia Rossignoli presented a thread on the relationship between Limbo and the “intense emotional landscape” of Dante’s Inferno. Rossignoli commented, “The boy’s journey originally revisits classical katabatic narratives (also inspiring Dante), including in its final unsettling encounter (his sister?), which brings no closure and instead intensifies the initial loss, eliminating any remaining hope of finding a way out.”

Read the full thread here.

Learn more about the game here.

Watch the trailer for the game here.

See more from #MAMG21 here.

Categories: Consumer Goods, Digital Media, Dining & Leisure
Tagged with: 2010, Digital Arts, Digital Games, Games, Inferno, Journeys, Limbo, Loss, Puzzles, Video Games

Deborah DeNicola, “Desire with Mountain and Dante” (2010)

May 4, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Deborah-De-Nicola-Desire-With-Mountain-and-Dante-Full-Text

Deborah DeNicola’s poem “Desire with Mountain and Dante” was published in the collection Original Human in 2010. In a personal email communication, DeNicola recounts, “I am an east-coast person and I was in Seattle and Mt. Rainier was in the distance. I had not been in a relationship for several years and was aware of my own ‘desire without an object of desire,’ as Wallace Stevens puts it. I had been teaching The Inferno so Dante was on my mind.”

Original Human can be purchased at Amazon. Many thanks to the author for permission to reprint the poem.

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2010, Desire, Fraud, Inferno, Lethe, Mountains, Poetry, Purgatorio, Seattle, Sowers of Discord, Teaching, United States, Washington

“Dante’s Inferno” at Kirkstall Forge

October 5, 2020 By lsanchez

“This was the large shed to the south of the water and my position is a best guess, especially as this area is now flat. This shed contained several hammers but these two were hard at work and quite spectacular. I think they were of eastern European construction (possibly Polish). Although working on compressed air these were essentially the same as steam hammers.”    –Chris Allen, Geograph, February 17, 2010

Categories: Places
Tagged with: 2010, England, Inferno, Leeds, Technology, United Kingdom

“Iraq: Dante’s Hell for Animals?”

December 29, 2019 By lsanchez

“Nearby, a brown bear that once roamed the Kurdish mountain reaches from the shadows of a filthy enclosure for a wafer biscuit that a boy holds just out of reach. Meanwhile, in a central cage that seems to double as the zoo’s garbage dump an adult male baboon makes lewd gestures to a group of teenage boys poking him with sticks. This sad place is not the beastly equivalent of Dante’s third hell, but a zoo — and a typical one for captive animals in Iraq.”    –Tracey Shelton, Public Radio International, May 22, 2010

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2010, Animal Rights, Animals, Circles of Hell, Environmentalism, Hell, Inferno, Iraq

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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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