Dante and the origins of Italian literary culture

484 Pages·2006·3.46 MB·English

by  Dante Alighieri

D A N T E A N D T H E O R I G I N S
O F I T A L I A N L I T E R A R Y
C U L T U R E
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DANTE AND THE
ORIGINS OF ITALIAN
LITERARY CULTURE
teodolinda barolini
❁
2006
Fordham University Press, New York,
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Copyright(cid:2)2006FordhamUniversityPress
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybereproduced,storedina
retrievalsystem,ortransmittedinanyformorbyanymeans—electronic,
mechanical,photocopy,recording,oranyother—exceptforbriefquotationsin
printedreviews,withoutthepriorpermissionofthepublisher.
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Barolini,Teodolinda,1951–
DanteandtheoriginsofItalianliteraryculture/TeodolindaBarolini.—1sted.
p. cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN-13:978-0-8232-2703-7(cloth:alk.paper)
ISBN-10:0-8232-2703-0(cloth:alk.paper)
ISBN-13:978-0-8232-2704-4(pbk.:alk.paper)
ISBN-10:0-8232-2704-9(pbk.:alk.paper)
1. DanteAlighieri,1265–1321—Influence—Italy. 2. Italianliterature—History
andcriticism. I. Title.
PQ4381.2.B37 2006
851(cid:2).1—dc22
2006029447
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1
Firstedition
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❁
This book is dedicated
with much love to the woman
who taught me to read,
my mother,
Helen Barolini,
The Original Reader Against the Grain
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Contents
Introduction
ReadingAgainsttheGrain:MusingsofanItalianist,
fromtheAstraltotheArtisanal 1
i. a philosophy of desire
1. DanteandtheLyricPast 23
2. Guittone’sOraparra`,Dante’sDogliamireca,
andtheCommedia’sAnatomyofDesire 47
3. DanteandCavalcanti(OnMakingDistinctionsinMattersofLove):
Inferno5inItsLyricandAutobiographicalContext 70
4. MedievalMulticulturalismandDante’sTheologyofHell 102
ii. christian and pagan intertexts
5. WhyDidDanteWritetheCommedia?
DanteandtheVisionaryTradition 125
6. Minos’sTail:TheLaborofDevisingHell
(Aeneid6.431–33andInferno5.1–24) 132
7. Q:DoesDanteHopeforVergil’sSalvation?
A:WhyDoWeCare?FortheVeryReason
WeShouldNotAsktheQuestion 151
8. Arachne,Argus,andSt.John:Transgressive
ArtinDanteandOvid 158
iii. ordering the macrotext:
time and narrative
9. Cominciandomidalprincipioinfinoalafine:
ForgingAnti-narrativeintheVitanuova 175
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Contents viii
10. TheMakingofaLyricSequence:TimeandNarrative
inPetrarch’sRerumvulgariumfragmenta 193
11. TheWheeloftheDecameron 224
12. EditingDante’sRimeandItalianCulturalHistory:Dante,Boccaccio,
Petrarca...Barbi,Contini,Foster-Boyde,DeRobertis 245
iv. gender
13. Leparolesonfemmineeifattisonmaschi:TowardaSexualPoeticsof
theDecameron(Decameron2.9,2.10,5.10) 281
14. DanteandFrancescadaRimini:Realpolitik,Romance,and
Gender 304
15. Sottobenda:GenderintheLyricsofDanteandGuittoned’Arezzo
(WithaBriefExcursusonCeccod’Ascoli) 333
16. NotestowardaGenderedHistoryofItalianLiterature,witha
DiscussionofDante’sBeatrixLoquax 360
Notes 379
Index 467
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Introduction
Reading Against the Grain:
Musings of an Italianist, from the Astral to the Artisanal
O
ne of the great pleasures of gathering my essays is the opportu-
nity afforded, by looking back, to chart the maze and find its princi-
ples of order. The pillars of my critical praxis stand clear in the light
ofretrospection.Oneistheimportanceoflearningfromthereception,
frequentlywiththegoalofdemystifyinganddeinstitutionalizingview-
points that have been given too much credence and authoritative
weight by centuries of repetition. Perhaps this attitude was born in
response to working on a text, Dante’s Commedia, which has pro-
duced masses of repetitive exegesis since the fourteenth century, and
in the context of a culture—Italian—that invests excessively in the
authority of tradition and indeed in the authority of authority itself.
As a young scholar I conceived it my duty to learn what had been
written,towadethroughmanycommentariesandlecturae.Ultimately
I learned not only to value the rare acuity of the fourteenth-century
commentator Benvenuto da Imola or the acerbic wit of Ludovico
Castelvetro in the sixteenth century but also how to learn from even
the most repetitive and least original contributions—which involved
less attention to the content of what was said, which had usually been
said before, than to the fact of these commentaries’ existence. This
authority-laden exegetical tradition taught me that a poet who takes
God as his guarantor,like the poet of the Commedia,could generate a
commentary tradition, and then exert a pull on his commentators not
so dissimilar from that of the Bible. I responded by wanting to study
and understand the modalities of how Dante went about constructing
an authorial voice that could exert such control, a response that took
me first in the direction of intertextuality in Dante’s Poets: Textuality
and Truth in the ‘‘Comedy’’ and then of narrative theory in The Undi-
vine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.1
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