Dante Today
Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary and Popular Culture
Written Word Archive
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"Where Sweatshops Are a Dream"
"This is a Dante-like vision of hell. It's a mountain of festering refuse, a half-hour hike across, emitting clouds of smoke from subterranean fires..." (in reference to a large garbage dump in Phnom Penh, Cambodia)
Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, January 14, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/opinion/15kristof.html?_r=1&emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
"You Will Feel the Heat" Penny Arcade comic (2008)
http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/12/15/
Contributed by Charlie Russell-Schlesinger (Bowdoin, '08)
Guy Raffa, "Danteworlds" (2007-2009)
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?mode=synopsis&bookkey=213286
Hope for Ye Who Enter Here
"It's not a video game and it's not CliffsNotes--Danteworlds is 'an integrated multimedia journey' through Dante's Divine Comedy. Situated somewhere in cyberspace between EverQuest and Solitaire, it's a terrific way to lose a month's worth of lunchtime in a cubicle. Most literary texts don't lend themselves to the 'integrated multimedia' approach, which often just whisks readers off the page into biographical or literary analysis land and strands them there. But, in the case of The Divine Comedy, and perhaps other epic poetry--the Odyssey comes to mind--the approach is a perfect marriage of medium and message, launching the reader right into the allegorical action, heightening rather than dulling appreciation and comprehension..."
Vicky Raab
The New Yorker, January 9, 2009
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2009/01/hope-for-ye-who.html
Francine Rivers, "Redeeming Love" (2007)
http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51vK45JTbpL._SL500_.jpg
The beginning of Chapter 11 begins, "In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood."
Contributed by Mary Scott George
Richard Wilbur, "Terza Rima"
TERZA RIMA
In this great form, as Dante proved in Hell,
There is no dreadful thing that can't be said
In passing. Here, for instance, one could tell
How our jeep skidded sideways toward the dead
Enemy soldier with the staring eyes,
Bumping a little as it struck his head,
And then flew on, as if toward Paradise.
The New Yorker, December 8, 2008
http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2008/12/08/081208po_poem_wilbur
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, '08)
John Kinsella, "Divine Comedy: Journeys Through a Regional Geography" (2008)
http://www.amazon.com/Divine-Comedy-Journeys-Regional-Geography/dp/039306655X
This mammoth new volume from Australia's Kinsella (Doppler Effect) takes its template and three-line stanza from the three books of Dante's epic, out of order: first Purgatorio, then Paradiso, then Inferno. Each of the three works, made from dozens of separate poems, joins allusions to Dante with sights, events and memories from Kinsella's Australia, especially the farming region outside Perth, where he grew up and sometimes lives. The poet's wife, Tracy (his Beatrice, he says), and their toddler, Tim, play roles throughout. Mostly, though, the poems concern places, not people; their ground note is ecological, with nature taking many forms (locust wings... at sunrise over shallow farm-dams steaming already) set against the ballast/ of cars and infrastructures that endangers it all. That motif of eco-protest dominates the Inferno (last blocks of bushland// cleared away to placate the hunger/ for the Australian Dream), but it turns up in all three of these (perhaps too similar, and surely too long) sequences. Like his compatriot Les Murray, Kinsella can sound uncontrolled, even sloppy. Yet he can turn a phrase (Who describes where we are without thinking/ of when we'll leave it?). Moreover, he means all he says and never exhausts his ideas or ambition. (Sept.) Publisher's Weekly
http://www.amazon.com/Divine-Comedy-Journeys-Regional-Geography/dp/039306655X
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, '08)
Aftermath of a Revolt: Myanmar's Lost Year
"In one sense, things have improved in recent years. Once a scene from Dante's hell--the few outsiders who visited sometimes described thousands upon thousands of half-naked men, women and children clawing into the rock in search of jade--the mining is now a largely mechanical process executed by industrial backhoes and dump trucks. A few mines still employ human diggers, and earlier this year one such site collapsed, killing 20."
Daniel Pepper, The New York Times, October 4, 2008
Andrew Davidson, "The Gargoyle" (2008)
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Gargoyle/Andrew-Davidson/e/9780385524940
"Seeing the angel wings on Marianne's bare back, the burn victim starts to melt. He also likes Marianne's captivating conversational style. ('For now, may I tell you a story about a dragon?') He wonders if, how and why she is crazy. He finds a reassuring internal consistency to the string of lovelorn fairy tales she tells him, and to the 14th-century biography she claims is her own. He finds it fitting that she wants to take a badly burned man on a guided tour of Dante's circles of hell... Although The Gargoyle is defiantly uncategorizable, Doubleday is hard at work taming it. (Suggested question for book club group discussions: 'What sort of tailor-made suffering might Dante have invented for you?')" Janet Maslin
Maslin, "Beyond Fiery Gates, All That an Inferno Allows" The New York Times, July 31, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/31/books/31maslin.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
Thomas H. Cook, "Master of the Delta" (2008)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0151012547
"Jack Branch, teaching high school in his hometown in the Mississippi Delta in 1954, is justifiably proud of his college-prep 'specialty' class on the nature of evil. It's a guts-and-gore attack on the classics--a potent mix of Dante and Melville and Jack the Ripper, delivered with the relish of Suetonius and the pizzazz of a burlesque stripper, and it prods his restless students to think about issues like hatred and intolerance. But this prideful young man, scion of an old aristocratic family who freely admits his sense of noblesse oblige in educating the poor and underprivileged, hasn't given a thought to the kind of evil he himself can generate by meddling in other people's lives." Marilyn Stasio
Marilyn Stasio, "Dangerous Lessons," The New York Times Book Review, July 13, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/books/review/Crime-t.html?emc=tnt&tntemail0=y
City of Florence pardons Dante
"The city of Florence has issued a pardon for the poet, 700 years after it sentenced him to death for his political beliefs. Peter Popham reports on the man who turned Italian into a literary language."
The Independent, June 19, 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/return-of-dante-the-guelphs-and-the-ghibellines-850012.html
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
Background Image: Domenico di Michelino, Dante and His Comedy, 1465
