Dante's 'Strangeness': The Commedia and the Late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon

A reflection on Dante and the literary canon may appear tautological since nowadays his belonging to the canon seems a self-evident matter of fact and an indisputable truth. It is for this very reason, though, that a paradigmatic role has been conferred on Dante in the contemporary debate both by those who consider the canon a stable structure based on inner aesthetic values and by those who see it as a cultural and social construction. For instance, Harold Bloom suggests that ‘Dante invented our modern idea of the canonical’, and Edward Said, in his reading of Auerbach, seems to imply that Dante provided foundations for what we call literature tout court. While his influence on other poets never ceased, the story of Dante’s explicit canonization through the centuries revolved around the same critical points we are still discussing today: his anti-classical ‘strangeness’ in language and style, the trouble he occasions in genre hierarchies and distinctions, and the vastness of the philosophical and theological knowledge embraced by the Commedia (and, as a consequence, the relationship between literature and other realms of human experience). Dante’s canonicity is also evinced by the ceaseless debates that he has inspired and the many cultural tensions of which he is the focus. What I will try to do in the next few pages is to reflect on the features that make the Commedia central both to the arguments of the defenders of the aesthetic approach, such as Bloom and Steiner, and to the political claims of the so-called ‘culture of complaint’.Federica Pich, ‘Dante’s ‘Strangeness’: The Commedia and the late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 21–35 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_02

The Historicity of Materialism and the Critique of Politics

This chapter proposes one definition of critical materialism and a critique of politics based on several authors from Marx to Foucault. This critique occurs in several stages and unfolds as a criticism of universals such as human freedom, general interest, political rationality, or reconciled political community. The decisive materialist-historical question, then, is which of the different materialities is dominant at a certain point of time. I argue that Marx condemns politics as an illusion. He thought of ‘political reason’ as a form of ‘spiritualism’. Hence, critical materialism argues for a move away from the illusion of politics

The Staircase Wit:or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose

‘The Staircase Wit; or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose’ explores idioms and Sprachbilder as poetic views of the mother tongue. This exploration involves a special focus on Müller’s Nobel lecture, considered as both a compendium and an enactment of her meditations on language, on the nature of writing, and on the creative process. While Müller frequently employs idioms in her articles, lectures, and novel titles, she never uses them in a superficial way or as a mere reproduction of common or daily speech. Rather, as this essay argues, idioms in Müller’s prose are indicative of her attitude toward language and toward the mother tongue in general. In the Nobel lecture as well as elsewhere, idioms serve a dual, occasionally conflicting purpose, combining the need for the ‘singularity’ of aesthetic experience with the search for a new kind of ‘conventionality’.Antonio Castore, ‘The Staircase Wit: or, The Poetic Idiomaticity of Herta Müller’s Prose’, in Untying the Mother Tongue, ed. by Antonio Castore and Federico Dal Bo, Cultural Inquiry, 26 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2023), pp. 181-210 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-26_9

Archival Diffractions:A Response to Le Nemesiache’s Call

In the reactivation of the feminist collective of artists Le Nemesiache, this paper looks at the tension between rhetoric and translation in relation to the dislocation of archival materials from their situatedness in place (Naples) and time (1970 to the present). Translation emerges as the conveyor of the conditions from which the addresser started, as well as the ones of the addressees, as a potential that takes place in the moment of enunciation through a plurality of subjects. Considering the epistemological tension between history and fiction, as well as the mediation that happens through the body and the different subjectivities triggered by intra-action, this essay will engage with the following question: if the archive is the memory, can dramaturgy and reenactment from the archive become the message of a prophecy?Giulia Damiani, ‘Archival Diffractions: A Response to Le Nemesiache’s Call’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Re-, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 81-89 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_09

Speculative Writing:Unfilmed Scripts and Premediation Events

This article investigates and proposes the concept of speculative writing, which is a disruptive sort of dramaturgy mediated by artificial intelligence. What are the kinds of events created by speculative writing? What might its history and genealogy be? What might the duration of an alphanumeric reenactment be? Guided by these questions, the article details its search for speculative writing in unfilmed script history as well as in premediation events. According to these concepts, this essay concludes that speculative writing will enact potential, abstract, and premediated events, which have never become material media.Pablo Gonçalo, ‘Speculative Writing: Unfilmed Scripts and Premediation Events’, in Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Re-, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 121-29 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21_13

Splitting Images:Understanding Irreversible Fractures through Aspect Change

Multistable figures or Kippbilder combine reversibility and irreversibility in an interesting way. While the so called first aspect change introduces an irreversible split, all subsequent aspect changes can be understood as an endless chain of reversible changes. And it is exactly because of this complex combination of an eventful moment and an undirected repetition of the same, Luca Di Blasi argues in his paper ‘Splitting Images. Understanding Irreversible Fractures Through the Aspect Change’, that Kippbilder can provide an interesting model for understanding better dramatic, existential, even religious events and their consequences. After discussing the specificity of the Rubin vase and its aspect changes and focussing then on the distinction between first and further aspect changes, Di Blasi suggests the productive potential of the multistable figure as model for eventful events in discussing the conversion of Paul and his hōs mē (‘as if not’)

Reversion:Lyric Time(s) II

Is a history of the lyric even conceivable? What would a lyrictemporality look like? With a focus on Rainer Maria Rilke’s decision not to translate, but rather to rewrite Dante’s Vita nova(1293–1295) in the first of his Duineser Elegien (1912), the essay deploys reversion (as turning back, return, coming around again), alongside re-citation, as a keyword that can unlock the transhistorical operations of the lyric as the re-enactment of selected gestures under different circumstances.Francesco Giusti, ‘Reversion: Lyric Time(s) II’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), pp. 151-61 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_19

Preface

Arnd Wedemeyer and Christoph F. E. Holzhey, ‘Preface’, in Re-: An Errant Glossary, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 15 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2019), p. vii-xv <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-15_01