Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

“The 5 Circles of Hell for Institutional Investment Professionals”

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“If an institutional investment professional were to be guided through Hell (a la Dante’s Inferno), he would pass by five circles of torment … all of which would contain colleagues frantically checking calendars and clocks, desperate to get through to-do lists that grow faster than items can be checked off. Time is indeed a valuable commodity, and the lack of it can be hell on earth.

“While the only way out of the Inferno was through the center of earth, the way out for investment professionals is much easier, thankfully. While it is impossible to add hours to the day, it is possible to reclaim some of those hours and put them to better use. Let’s follow our guide – not Dante’s Virgil, but our own modern-day Technos – through the five circles of hell for institutional investment professionals.”   –Ken Akoundi, Backstop Blog, 2018

Read the full article here.

Akash Kumar, “A Dante Who Valorizes Difference” (2020)

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“Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy in 2020 is not without its challenges. In 2012, the UN-sanctioned human rights organization Gherush92 proclaimed that Dante’s poem was discriminatory, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, and should not be taught in classrooms. For some years now, I have taken this objection as my point of departure in crafting my Dante course and promoted a reading of the poem that interrogates issues of social justice with respect to the representation of religious and cultural difference, gender and sexuality, and social class. In the wake of a summer of protest, I felt all the more impelled to bring such considerations to bear in my Dante class this Fall. [. . .]”   –Akash Kumar, “A Dante Who Valorizes Difference,” The Medieval Studies Institute Blog, Indiana University

Akash Kumar is Visiting Assistant Professor of Italian at Indiana University. Read his full essay on teaching Dante through the lens of social justice here.

“Marcus Berkmann: Circles of Hell”

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“‘No, that’s definitely the way you want to go,’ said the same man in the hi-vis jacket, whose integrity we were beginning to doubt. But every route we tried, the satnav eventually led us back to the same roundabout, often by the most circuitous of routes. We had no mobile coverage, so could not raise a map by those means. It was like an episode of The Prisoner. Every wrong turning we took, we expected a huge white barrage balloon to head us off.”    –Marcus Berkmann, The Independent, October 9, 2015

“Dante’s Inferno has always been so funny to me…”

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“Dante’s Inferno has always been so funny to me because its this really important classic that is constantly referenced, but at the same time it’s really just a burn book. Dante Alighieri is Regina George and he wrote an entire book about a bunch of people he hates and why he hates them. Dante took out his pink gel pen and wrote out in big cursive letters: Achilles is a slut.”   —aphrodarling on tumblr (April 24, 2019)

Regina George is the antagonist of the 2004 film Mean Girls.

Contributed by Kate McKee (Bowdoin College ’22)

Waiting for Dante by Roger Williamson

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“It was then she appeared, Beatrice, she who would show me, just in time, the illusion of the beast and the spell to return it to the glass.

Virgil, who was able to bring me into this world but not out of it, because of his own self imprisonment in it, began to fade from view and as he paled so Beatrice seemed to absorb his substance and morphed into my new guide.”    –Roger Williamson, Saatchi Art, October 24, 2015

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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