Dantologies

The comparison of current theoretical approaches to Dante, particularly those mobilizing the resources of theology, serves to adumbrate and illustrate, by application to Dante studies as a specific field of scholarship, the author's own philosophy of culture and the humanities

This book comprises a searching philosophical meditation on the evolution of the humanities in recent decades, taking Dante studies as an exemplary specimen. The contemporary currents of theory have decisively impacted this field, but Dante also has a strong relationship with theology. The idea that theology, teleology, and logocentric rationalities are simply overcome and swept away by new theoretical approaches proves much more complex as the theory revolution is exposed in its crypto-theological motives and origins. The revolutionary agendas and methodologies of theoretical currents have ushered in all manner of minorities and postcolonial and gender studies. But the exciting adventure they inaugurate shows up in quite a surprising light when brought to focus through the scholarly discipline of Dante studies as a terrain of dispute between traditional philology and postmodern theory. On this terrain, negative theology can play a peculiarly destabilizing, but also a conciliatory, role: it is equally critical of all languages for a theological transcendence to which it nevertheless remains infinitely open.

Autorentext

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities, a Dante scholar, and a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has also been professor of philosophy at the University of Macao (201316), Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg (200506), and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at Potsdam University (199495). In 2021, he became Honorary Professor (Professor Honoris Causa) of the Agora Hermeneutica. Franke's apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society ranging from identity politics to cognitive science and media studies in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). As a philosopher of the humanities with a negative theological vision, Franke elaborates a theological poetics in books including Dante's Interpretive Journey (1996), Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression: "The Transgression of the Sign" (2012). He traces the ramifications of Dante's theological poetics forward in modern poetry (Secular Scriptures: Theological Poetics and the Challenge of Modernity, 2016) and backward toward Dante's own sources (The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante, 2015). His book Dante's Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection (2021) received the Hermes Award: Book of the Year in Phenomenological Hermeneutics from The International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH). It is cited along with Franke's two other speculative monographs revolving around Dante published in the same year: The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation (2021) and Dante's Vita Nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation (2021).

Inhalt

Preface

Disclaimer and Acknowledgments

Introduction: Theoretical and Theological Turns in Dante Studies

Setting the Scene: The Wider Critical Context

Theory and Theology: De-limitations of Context

Some Theoretical Approaches to Dante Preparing the Turn to Theology

Faith and Philosophy Dante's Christian-Neoplatonic Synthesis

The Theological Turn Its Discontents and Defenders

Ancient Theological versus Modern Secular Approaches to Reading Dante

Part I: Critical Encounters in Dante Studies with the Theoretical/Theological Turn

1. Equivocations of Comparative Metaphysics in Christian Moevs's Nondualist Comedy

2. A Theology of Human Encounter: Vittorio Montemaggi's Professional-Personal Testament

3. Professional Dantology and the Human Significance of Dante Studies: Justin Steinberg on the Limits of Law and Representability

4. Gregory Stone and the Universalist Aspirations of Philosophy in Dante

5. Giuseppe Mazzotta and Dante's Poetic Theology of Universalism
   Part II: Essays in the Theoretical/Theological Criticism of Dante

6. Paul Celan, Dante's Manfred, and the Woundedness of Language as our Common Bond

7. Language and Transcendence in Dante's Paradiso

8. The Place of the Proper Name in the Topographies of the Paradiso

9. Dante and East Asian Buddhism: The Apophatic Connection and Human Rights

10. Dante's Theology and Contemporary Thought: Recovering Transcendence?

Index