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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture

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Sirante’s recent graffiti in Rome (2018)

May 28, 2018 By Professor Arielle Saiber

This piece by Sirante is in protest of the Giro d’Italia beginning in Israel. Note Dante and Virgil in the poster, watching today’s Inferno.

The image is modeled on Gustave Doré’s illustration of the violent against God in Inferno 14.

Contributed by Virginia Jewiss 

Categories: Visual Art & Architecture
Tagged with: 2018, Giro d'Italia, Graffiti, Gustave Doré, Israel, Italian Politics, Italy, Palestine, Political Commentary, Politics, Rome, Sports, Street Art, Violence

Thinking Against Violence

December 16, 2015 By Professor Arielle Saiber

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Images projected in Lyon, France, as tribute to the victims of the Paris attacks. Credit Robert Pratta/Reuters

This is an interview with Brad Evans, a senior lecturer in international relations at the University of Bristol in England. He is the founder and director of the Histories of Violence project, a global research initiative on the meaning of mass violence in the 21st century.

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[…] “But let’s consider for a moment what the thinker [the sculpture by Rodin] is actually contemplating. Sat alone on his plinth, the thinker could in fact be thinking about anything in particular. We just hope it is something serious. Such ambiguity was not however as Rodin intended. In the original 1880 sculpture, the thinker actually appears kneeling before the Gates of Hell. We might read this as significant for a whole number of reasons. First, it is the “scene of violence,” which gives specific context to Rodin’s thinker. Thought begins for the thinker in the presence of the raw realities of violence and suffering. The thinker in fact is being forced to suffer into truth.

“Second, there is an interesting tension in terms of the thinker’s relationship to violence. Sat before the gates, the thinker appears to be turning away from the intolerable scene behind. This we could argue is a tendency unfortunately all too common when thinking about violence today. Turning away into abstraction or some scientifically neutralizing position of “objectivity.” And yet, according to one purposeful reading, the figure in this commission is actually Dante, who is contemplating the circles of hell as narrated in The Divine Comedy. This is significant. Rather than looking away, might it be that the figure is now actually staring directing into the abyss below? Hence raising the fundamental ethical question of what it means to be forced witness to violence?” […]   –Natasha Lennard and Brad Evans, The New York Times, December 16, 2015

 

Categories: Written Word
Tagged with: 2015, New York City, Paris, Rodin, Sculptures, Violence

Google+ and McSweeney

August 1, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

google-and-mcsweeney
Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, August 1, 2011

Contributed by Steve Bartus (Bowdoin, ’08)

Categories: Consumer Goods
Tagged with: 2011, Avarice, Beatrice, Circles of Hell, Gluttony, Google, Heresy, Humor, Internet, Lust, Social Media, Violence, Wrath

Dante at the Supreme Court

June 28, 2011 By Professor Arielle Saiber

dante-at-the-supreme-court“From Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in today’s case involving violent video games, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Assn.: California’s argument would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, but there is none.  Certainly the books we give children to read — or read to them when they are younger — contain no shortage of gore. . . In the Inferno, Dante and Virgil watch corrupt politicians struggle to stay submerged beneath a lake of boiling pitch, lest they be skewered by devils above the surface . . . Justice Alito accuses us of pronouncing that playing violent video games “is not different in ‘kind'” from reading violent literature.  Well of course it is different in kind, but not in a way that causes the provision and viewing of violent video games, unlike the provision and reading of books, not to be expressive activity and hence not to enjoy First Amendment protection.  Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat.  But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones.  Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy, and restrictions upon them must survive strict scrutiny[.]” […]    –Marc DeGirolami, Mirror of Justice, June 27, 2011

Contributed by Patrick Molloy

Categories: Consumer Goods, Odds & Ends
Tagged with: 2011, California, Games, Supreme Court, Video Games, Violence, 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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