Dante Today

Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

Dante in the Essays of Susan Sontag

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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.

Tyler E. Boudreau, Packing Inferno: The Unmaking of a Marine (2008)

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tyler-e-boudreau-author-of-packing-inferno-the-unmaking-of-a-marine“Mr. Boudreau’s book, Packing Inferno (Feral House, $16.95), is an uncompromising narrative of his experiences in Iraq and his struggle to deal with the human consequences, both in the Middle East and, later, at home. His writing is vivid, detailed and filled with emotion.

“The book’s title refers to his having discovered that, among other books, he had packed Dante’s Inferno when he was deployed to Iraq, in what appeared to be a prescient move as the months went by. Mr. Boudreau writes this about a few tense moments when he and his men had to decide what to do when a truck heading in the wrong direction barreled toward them on the shoulder of the road” [. . .]    –Pamela H. Sacks, Telegram, March 1, 2009

Martin Kemp, Visions of Heaven: Dante and the Art of Divine Light (2021)

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visions-of-heaven-dante-and-the-art-of-divine-light-martin-kemp-cover“In Visions of Heaven, renowned scholar Martin Kemp investigates Dante’s supreme vision of divine light and its implications for the visual artists who were the inheritors of Dante’s vision. The whole book may be regarded as a new Paragone (comparison), the debate that began in the Renaissance about which of the arts is superior. Dante’s ravishing accounts of divine light set painters the severest challenge, which took them centuries to meet. A major theme running through Dante’s Divine Comedy, particularly in its third book, the Paradiso, centres on Dante s acts of seeing (conducted according to optical rules with respect to the kind of visual experience that can be accomplished on earth) and the overwhelming of Dante s earthly senses by heavenly light, which does not obey his rules of earthly optics. [. . .] Published to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Dante’s death, this hugely original book combines a close reading of Dante’s poetry with analysis of early optics and the art of the Renaissance and Baroque to create a fascinating, wide-ranging and visually exciting study.”    — Amazon (retrieved October 18, 2021)

Martha Beck, The Way of Integrity (2021)

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“In The Way of Integrity, Beck presents a four-stage process that anyone can use to find integrity, and with it, a sense of purpose, emotional healing, and a life free of mental suffering. Much of what plagues us—people pleasing, staying in stale relationships, negative habits—all point to what happens when we are out of touch with what truly makes us feel whole.

“Inspired by The Divine Comedy, Beck uses Dante’s classic hero’s journey as a framework to break down the process of attaining personal integrity into small, manageable steps. She shows how to read our internal signals that lead us towards our true path, and to recognize what we actually yearn for versus what our culture sells us.

“With techniques tested on hundreds of her clients, Beck brings her expertise as a social scientist, life coach and human being to help readers to uncover what integrity looks like in their own lives. She takes us on a spiritual adventure that not only will change the direction of our lives, but bring us to a place of genuine happiness.”   —marthabeck.com

Dinty W. Moore, To Hell With It: Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno (2021)

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“Dante published his ambitious and unusual poem, Divine Comedy, more than seven hundred years ago. In the ensuing centuries countless retellings, innumerable adaptations, tens of thousands of fiery sermons from Catholic bishops and Baptist preachers, all those New Yorker cartoons, and masterpieces of European art have afforded Dante’s fictional apparition of hell unending attention and credibility. Dinty W. Moore did not buy in.

“Moore started questioning religion at a young age, quizzing the nuns in his Catholic school, and has been questioning it ever since. Yet after years of Catholic school, religious guilt, and persistent cultural conditioning, Moore still can’t shake the feelings of inadequacy, and asks: What would the world be like if eternal damnation was not hanging constantly over our sheepish heads? Why do we persist in believing a myth that merely makes us miserable? In To Hell with It, Moore reflects on and pokes fun at the over-seriousness of religion in various texts, combining narratives of his everyday life, reflections on his childhood, and religion’s influence on contemporary culture and society.”   —University of Nebraska Press

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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