The divine vision of Dante's Paradiso : the metaphysics of representation / William Franke.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Franke, William, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Paradiso--Canto 18.

Dante Alighieri.

Revelation in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xix, 304 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Summary:

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

Contents:

The literary vision. Writing as theophany : the medium as metaphor for immediacy

The presence of speech in writing : speaking as sparking

The parts of speech : mediation and contingency

From speculative grammar to visual spectacle and beyond

Sense made sensuous and synaesthesia in the sight and sound of writing

Infinite script : endless mediation as metaphor for divinity

Philosophical reflections. Language as concocted of letters versus the mysticism of the name

Saussure and the structuralist idea of language as a system of differences

Temporalization and transcendence of time through language

Transcendental reflection : time synthesis and the role of the "I"

Unmanifest wholeness of sense : language as image of the imageless

Transcendentality of language and the language of the other

Appendix 1: Paradiso XVIII, 71-136, Italian text and English translation.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 26 Aug 2021).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

1-009-03697-1

1-009-03731-5

1-009-03783-8