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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Dan Simmons, The Hollow Man (1992)

August 27, 2021 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“Jeremy Bremen has a secret.  All his life he’s been cursed with the ability to read minds.  He knows the secret thoughts, fears, and desires of others as if they were his own.  For years, his wife, Gail, has served as a shield between Jeremy and the burden of this terrible knowledge.  But Gail is dying, her mind ebbing slowly away, leaving him vulnerable to the chaotic flood of thought that threatens to sweep away his sanity.  Now Jeremy is on the run–from his mind, from his past, from himself–hoping to find peace in isolation.  Instead he witnesses an act of brutality that propels him on a treacherous trek across a dark and dangerous America.  From a fantasy theme park to the lair of a killer to a sterile hospital room in St. Louis, he follows a voice that is calling him to witness the stunning mystery at the heart of mortality.”   –Amazon

The novel is filled with references to Dante and his works, and opens with a quotation from Paradiso 17.

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 1992, Horror, Inferno, Literature, Novels, Paradiso, Purgatorio, Science Fiction

Mohammad Rabie, Otared (2016)

August 27, 2021 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“2025: fourteen years after the failed revolution, Egypt is invaded once more. As traumatized Egyptians eke out a feral existence in Cairo’s dusty downtown, former cop Ahmed Otared joins a group of fellow officers seeking Egypt’s liberation through the barrel of a gun. As Cairo becomes a foul cauldron of drugs, sex, and senseless violence, Otared finally understands his country’s fate. In this unflinching and grisly novel, Mohammad Rabie envisages a grim future for Egypt, where death is the only certainty.”   —Amazon.   (this dystopian, apocalyptic science fiction novel is organized in line with Dante’s circles of Hell)

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2016, Apocalyptic Fiction, Arab Spring, Dystopian Fiction, Egypt, Fiction, Literature, Novels, Science Fiction

Sylvain Reynard, Gabriel’s Inferno (2012)

July 26, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Enigmatic and sexy, Professor Gabriel Emerson is a well-respected Dante specialist by day, but by night he devotes himself to an uninhibited life of pleasure. He uses his notorious good looks and sophisticated charm to gratify his every whim, but is secretly tortured by his dark past and consumed by the profound belief that he is beyond all hope of redemption.

“When the sweet and innocent Julia Mitchell enrolls as his graduate student, his attraction and mysterious connection to her not only jeopardizes his career, but sends him on a journey in which his past and his present collide.

“An intriguing and sinful exploration of seduction, forbidden love, and redemption, Gabriel’s Inferno is a captivating and wildly passionate tale of one man’s escape from his own personal hell as he tries to earn the impossible—forgiveness and love.”   —Penguin Random House

The 2012 novel, set in Toronto, was adapted into a three-part series of films starring Giulio Berruti and Melanie Zanetti and directed by Tosca Musk. It was produced and released by Musk’s company Passionflix in 2020. The image above comes from the Amazon Prime Video page for the film. Gabriel’s Rapture (Part Two) and Gabriel’s Redemption (Part Three) are scheduled for release in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

Contributed by Margaret Goodspeed

Categories: Performing Arts, Written Word
Tagged with: 2012, 2020, Beatrice, Campus, Canada, Colleges, Erotica, Films, Hell, Inferno, Love, Novels, Romance, Sex, Students, Teaching, Toronto, Universities

Adam Roberts, Purgatory Mount (2021)

July 19, 2021 By Professor Arielle Saiber

“An interstellar craft is decelerating after its century-long voyage. Its destination is V538 Aurigae, a now-empty planet dominated by one gigantic megastructure, a conical mountain of such height that its summit is high above the atmosphere. The ship’s crew of five hope to discover how the long-departed builders made such a colossal thing, and why: a space elevator? a temple? a work of art? Its resemblance to the mountain of purgatory lead the crew to call this world Dante.

“In our near future, the United States is falling apart. A neurotoxin has interfered with the memory function of many of the population, leaving them reliant on their phones as makeshift memory prostheses. But life goes on. For Ottoline Barragão, a regular kid juggling school and her friends and her beehives in the back garden, things are about to get very dangerous, chased across the north-east by competing groups, each willing to do whatever it takes to get inside Ottoline’s private network and recover the secret inside.

“Purgatory Mount, Adam Roberts’s first SF novel for three years, combines wry space opera and a fast-paced thriller in equal measure. It is a novel about memory and atonement, about exploration and passion, and like all of Roberts’s novels it’s not quite like anything else.”    —Amazon

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2021, America, Journeys, Literature, Novels, Planets, Purgatorio, Purgatory, Science Fiction, Space, Thrillers, United States

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007)

March 30, 2021 By Professor Elizabeth Coggeshall

“Dinaw Mengestu belongs to that special group of American voices produced by global upheavals and intentional, if sometimes forced, migrations. These are the writer-immigrants coming here from Africa, East India, Eastern Europe and elsewhere. Their struggles for identity mark a new turn within the ranks of American writers I like to call ‘the in-betweeners.’ The most interesting work in American literature has often been done by such writers, their liminality and luminosity in American culture produced by changing national definitions (Twain, Kerouac, Ginsberg), by being the children of immigrants themselves (Bellow, Singer), by voluntary exile (Baldwin, Hemingway) and by trauma (Bambara, Morrison).

[. . .]

“Judith, a white woman who moves into the predominantly black Logan Circle, becomes Sepha’s Beatrice, and, as with Dante, she leads him from his exile to purgatory and, eventually, to redemption. They meet over the counter in Sepha’s store, which is where all the community eventually comes together – to buy, to hang out, to shoplift, to receive and pass along gossip. Sepha’s relationship with Judith is facilitated by the wonderful connection he has to Judith’s precocious daughter, Naomi. And like Dante and Beatrice, they have a love that remains fraught and unconsummated but powerful and transformative nonetheless. Part of the difficulty is that Judith represents the new wave of gentrification and Sepha’s decision to date her is seen as an act of betrayal by the other residents. Neighborhood tensions build because of Judith (since she symbolizes the oppressor), and her home is firebombed by local thugs. Sepha’s own redemption and the choice he makes in this matter are what shape his new self.”   –Chris Abani, “Dante, Beatrice in a narrative of immigration,” The Baltimore Sun (March 11, 2007)

Contributed by Francesco Ciabattoni (Georgetown University)

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2007, Africa, African American, America, Beatrice, Ethiopia, Exile, Fiction, Gentrification, Immigration, Neighborhoods, Novels, Purgatory, Transformation, Washington D.C.

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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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