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In Dante's Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition
Waking to find himself shipwrecked on a strange shore before a dark wood, the pilgrim of the Divine Comedy realizes he must set his sights higher and guide his ship to a radically different port. Starting on the sand of that very shore with Dante, John Freccero begins retracing the famous voyage recounted by the poet nearly 700 years ago.
Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante’s great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem.
Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature― Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo―demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante’s wake.
Freccero follows pilgrim and poet through the Comedy and then beyond, inviting readers both uninitiated and accomplished to join him in navigating this complex medieval masterpiece and its influence on later literature. Perfectly impenetrable in its poetry and unabashedly ambitious in its content, the Divine Comedy is the cosmos collapsed on itself, heavy with dense matter and impossible to expand. Yet Dante’s great triumph is seen in the tiny, subtle fragments that make up the seamless whole, pieces that the poet painstakingly sewed together to form a work that insinuates itself into the reader and inspires the work of the next author. Freccero magnifies the most infinitesimal elements of that intricate construction to identify self-similar parts, revealing the full breadth of the great poem.
Using this same technique, Freccero then turns to later giants of literature― Petrarch, Machiavelli, Donne, Joyce, and Svevo―demonstrating how these authors absorbed these smallest parts and reproduced Dante in their own work. In the process, he confronts questions of faith, friendship, gender, politics, poetry, and sexuality, so that traveling with Freccero, the reader will both cross unknown territory and reimagine familiar faces, swimming always in Dante’s wake.
286 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2015
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February 1, 2022
无疑每一位热爱但丁的读者初读Freccero的文章都会惊艳于他灵气逼人的解读和论证，但那还只是这些文章魅力的一部分。我认为Freccero最了不起的，是当你已经有些摸到他的套路（“什么鬼，不可能全是Augustine吧”），并开始刻意地在他的行文中寻找结论先行的痕迹的时候，他令你信服和惊奇的程度似乎仍不受任何影响。即使单论写作技巧也是顶级的。从一个非学术读者的视角，在我读过的所有神曲解读材料里，迄今唯有Freccero让我觉得——他从他的研究对象那里神秘地偷到一些东西。 【只有前半部分是但丁研究哈 后半部分是4篇分别论述彼特拉克、马基雅维利、多恩和斯维沃的论文。
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