Criticism

Dante in the Essays of Susan Sontag

March 22, 2022 By Harrison Betz, FSU '25

American author and essayist Susan Sontag cites Dante and his Divine Comedy in a number of her essays. In her famous “Notes on ‘Camp’,” the Divine Comedy is referenced as part of “the pantheon of high culture: truth, beauty, and seriousness” (1966, 286). In “Against Interpretation,” Sontag states: “Once upon a time (say, for Dante), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to design works of art so that they might be experienced on several levels. Now it is not” (1966, 13).

Sontag published “Notes on ‘Camp'” in 1964, but the essay was republished, along with “Against Interpretation,” in her 1966 collection Against Interpretation.

See our other post featuring the work of Sontag here.

Hyperallgeric: “Why is Dante the Florentine still present with us 700 years after his death?”

February 24, 2021 By Laura Chatellier, FSU '23

“Recognition of the poem’s importance began very early. The first man to write a commentary on The Divine Comedy was Dante’s eldest son, Jacopo. A full exegesis of the work came several decades later. There are 800 early manuscripts of the poem in existence

“It is in some of these that we begin to see the different ways in which artists responded to this often dense and difficult text, with its multiple layers of meaning. First we spot small illustrations of the poem’s principal characters at the beginning of each hand-scribed canto. A little later, scenes from the poem begin to appear in churches, on frescoes by Luca Signorelli in Orvieto Cathedral (c. 1500), for example.

“The most important visual interpreters of the poem were three: Sandro Botticelli, who lived in the 16th century, William Blake, and Gustave Doré, both of whom lived in the 19th: a Florentine (like Dante himself), an Englishman, and a Frenchman.” [. . .] –Michael Glover, Hyperallergic, February 13, 2021.

Gloria Naylor, Linden Hills (1985)

July 7, 2009 By Alexa Kellenberger FSU '22

“Like Amiri Baraka in The Systems of Dante’s Hell (1965), Miss Naylor has adapted Dante’s Inferno to her own fictional purposes – in this instance a tale of lost black souls trapped in the American dream. The setting is Linden Hills, an upper-middle-class black community built on a huge plot of land owned by the mysterious Nedeed family (the locale is not specified). Purchased by Luther Nedeed in 1820 – after he had sold his octoroon wife and six children into slavery and moved from Tupelo, Miss., we are told – the land has remained under the proprietorship of the Nedeeds for more than 150 years. Luther (read Lucifer), as all the males in the Nedeed family are named, opened a funeral parlor, then developed the land and leased sections to black families. His sons and grandsons, all of whom are physical copies of the original landowner, furthered his plan – to establish a showcase black community. That community, as the original Luther says, would not only be an ‘ebony jewel’ representing black achievement, but also ‘a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America.'” –Mel Watkins, “The Circular Driveways of Hell,” New York Times (March 3, 1985)

“Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills follows two young black male poets on their downward journey through a prosperous community built for blacks who aspire to live out a white-patented dream of social advancement. Naylor’s appropriation of Dante’s Inferno as master narrative for this landscape of private torments (a white model for black society) replicates the choice made by Linden Hills itself. The ironies of this are rich and difficult to control: but the attention paid to the sufferings of women in this arrangement adds something quite new to the English-language Dante tradition.” –David Wallace, “Dante in English,” in Rachel Jacoff’s The Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2007

How to Cite