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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Dwight Garner, “‘Echo’s Bones,’ A Beckett Short Story Rediscovered”

July 28, 2014 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

Beckett-Echos-Bones-Belacqua-Dante“When the British publisher Chatto & Windus agreed in 1933 to publish Samuel Beckett’s first book of fiction, a collection of 10 interrelated stories titled ‘More Pricks Than Kicks,’ it asked him for one final story, a culminating wallop.

“There was a problem. Beckett had killed off the book’s protagonist, a Dublin intellectual named Belacqua Shuah, in an earlier story. He had to be nonchalantly resurrected. A second problem arose. Beckett’s editor at Chatto & Windus, Charles Prentice, found the new story Beckett delivered, ‘Echo’s Bones,’ to resemble less a comely infant than a troubling heap of placenta and broken forceps.

“’It is a nightmare,’ Prentice wrote to Beckett. This was the start of one of the great rejection letters in literary history. ‘It gives me the jim-jams.’ He declared: ‘People will shudder and be puzzled and confused.’

It’s not you, Prentice continued. It’s me. ‘I am sitting on the ground, and ashes are on my head.’ [. . .]

“Its pleasures border on the painful; you will have to like the sound of breaking glass. You may wish to exclaim about ‘Echo’s Bones,’ as Belacqua does about his re-emergence on earth, ‘My soul begins to be idly goaded and racked, all the old pains and aches of me soul-junk return!’

Soul-junk isn’t a bad term for Beckett’s prose here. ‘Echo’s Bones,’ as Mr. Nixon’s annotations make clear, is a magpie’s assortment of references, allusions and quotations, with nods to Dante, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mozart, biographies, folklore, movies, popular songs. Set amid all this are cosmic stage directions of the sort we later became familiar with in Beckett. Here’s one: ‘Doyle ate dirt.'”    –Dwight Garner, “A Castoff Joins a Master’s Canon: ‘Echo’s Bones,’ A Beckett Short Story Rediscovered,” New York Times

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: Literature, Purgatorio, Short Stories

Dante in a Genealogy of Literature

February 2, 2014 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

mendelsohn“This is the essentially genealogical model of influence taught in college literature courses: Homer begat Virgil, Virgil begat Dante, and so on.”    –Daniel Mendelsohn, “Which Authors of Books Have Worked on You as ‘Negative Influences’?” New York Times, January 21, 2014

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2014, Literature, New York City

“Books, Just Like You Wanted”

January 3, 2014 By Professor Arielle Saiber

03bits-knightley-tmagArticle“Kiera Knightley in the 2005 film “Pride and Prejudice.” The book by Jane Austen is among the most opened books on Oyster but is finished less than 1 percent of the time.”

“Anyone can publish a book these days, and just about everyone does. But if the supply of writers is increasing at a velocity unknown in literary history, the supply of readers is not. That is making competition for attention rather fierce. One result: ceaseless self-promotion by eager beginners.” […]

“Another commentator quoted the poet Joseph Brodsky, who wrote that ‘in cultural matters, it is not demand that creates supply, it is the other way around. You read Dante because he wrote The Divine Comedy, not because you felt the need for him: you would not have been able to conjure either the man or the poem.’ ” […]    –David Streitfeld, The New York Times, January 3, 2014

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2014, Books, Literature, Self-Publishing

Susan Jihrad, Dickens’ Inferno (2013)

December 24, 2013 By Professor Arielle Saiber

jhirad“This book is a fascinating and original insight into two authors who have inspired us for centuries. Perhaps unique among world authors, Dickens and Dante create comprehensive moral systems still strikingly relevant in today’s world, filled with greed, religious hypocrisy, fraud, violence and war. At the same time their compelling characters can still move us to tears and laughter. By dropping them into their appropriate circles of Dante’s Inferno, Professor Jhirad delves deeply into Dickens’ villains in a way that is both scholarly and accessible to the average reader. Additional chapters on Dickens’ Purgatory and Paradise add richness to the book.”  —Amazon

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2013, England, Literary Criticism, Literature, Novels

“Kindred Spirits: A Juxtaposition of Dante & Dickens”

December 19, 2013 By Professor Arielle Saiber

dante-and-scrooge“. . . I cannot recall a time when I didn’t know the story of A Christmas Carol. The images and themes have delighted or haunted me since my childhood, either in the form of the ‘Dickens Village’ adventure at the mall or the hundredth or so viewing of the Muppet version. (Michael Caine, you will always be my Scrooge.) So when I studied Dante’s Commedia in college, it was no leap for me to recognize the countless similarities between the two stories. I would write C.C. in the margin every time I came across another bit of Dickens in Dante. At long last, I can pitch some these ideas to the wider world.”     –Kathyrn (blogger), Through a Glass Brightly, December 18, 2013

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Categories: Performing Arts, Written Word
Tagged with: 2013, Blogs, Fiction, Films, Humor, Literature, Narrative, Television, Theater

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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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