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Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture

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Dale E. Basye, "Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go" (2010 - )

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"Heck: Where Bad Kids Go is a series of books that seems to have drawn heavy inspiration from Dante's Inferno. After the first installment in the series, each subsequent book is focused on a specific "circle of Heck." The characters' names seem to draw inspiration from different sources of "infernal" literature - more specifically, Dante, Milton, and Goethe: Virgil, Milton, and Fauster, for example. At one point in the series, the protagonists have to cross 'the great tunnel of dung-the River Styx, the final, fecal resting place of all the world's sewage.' "

Gianluca P., 4th grade

Posted in: Written Word

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Posted by Arielle Saiber on June 28, 2012 9:52 AM |

This experimental website, inspired by students of Arielle Saiber’s “Dante’s Divine Comedy” course, has been built to archive occurrences of Dante and his works in popular and contemporary culture of the twentieth century and beyond. The site catalogs a wide range of Dante "sightings": from the cursory to the extensive, and from a place of superficial knowledge of Dante and his works to deep familiarity with them. We leave to the readers the opportunity to judge the nature of each citing, and note the frequency of certain themes over others. The goals are twofold: 1) to provide a central access point for said references; and 2) to offer data that students and scholars of Dante can use to think about the Nachleben (“afterlife”) of Dante’s works in relation to reception theory, resonance, and cultural studies.

Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465

Arielle Saiber · Bowdoin College

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