[Red Badger]

PinGGG!............................

[spankalib]

bkmk

[Boogieman]

‘In Downey’s words, Dante gives “powers to the comic poet unheard of in the ancient world,” and paves the road for Romantic poets, who erase “the difference between their own creations and the unique claims of the biblical comedy.” ‘

No, not powers unheard of in the ancient world, just liberties purposefully not before taken in the ancient Christian world. If you read Homer, he is putting words in the mouths of the gods all the time. Dante, much like the Romantics after him, was just trying to recapture that “creative freedom” that was lost when paganism gave way to Christianity. Of course, if Christianity is accepted as true, then that “creative freedom”, taken too far, is actually license and blasphemy.

[G Larry]

Or, we can simply reject this assertion:

"If Aquinas is right, though, Dante’s desire to be read allegorically is blasphemous. Only The Divine Poet may infuse a text with spiritual senses, as God did in writing the divine comedy, Scripture."

[KingLudd]

Modern? He was born 750 years ago.

[Mr. K]

It’s like denigrating ‘Star Wars’ because it does not portray ‘real space travel’

It’s FICTION designed to portray ideas.

[Verginius Rufus]

Dante Bichette is pretty good too (lifetime batting average .299). No relation to the author of the Divine Comedy.

[Honorary Serb]

My Humanities professors at MIT assigned us to read Dante (in translation), and had us hear what part of the poems read in Italian sounded like!

They did a good deed!!!!

[hinckley buzzard]

Interesting effort but way over-thought. The philosopher Downey’s “scathing” critique illustrates why critics just don’t have much to offer to the appreciation of art. As Wordsworth would have it, “they murder to dissect.”

Missing in all this is the intense personal dimension of la Comedia for Dante the man. The characters he encounters in the Inferno are real people against whom Dante held grievances: certain bishops of Rome, merchants, bankers of Florence; the conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines (Dante was a Guelph); and the redeeming power of love for his idealized Beatrice, whom he worshipped from afar but had barely ever met, yet who guides him to heaven in Paradiso.

Doesn’t sound like the writer, much less his students, has much interest in the significance of this classic allegory from the late Middle Ages. (Dante began writing it in 1300.) Because the Comedia was written in everyday Italian rather than Latin, it became the foundation for a united Italian language. In this regard Dante should be honored less as the latter day Virgil than as the Italian Shakespeare..