Description
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.
Table of Contents
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
- Equivocations of Comparative Metaphysics in Christian Moevs’s Nondualist Comedy
- A Theology of Human Encounter: Vittorio Montemaggi’s Professional-Personal Testament
- Professional Dantology and the Human Significance of Dante Studies: Justin Steinberg on the Limits of Law and Representability
- Gregory Stone and the Universalist Aspirations of Philosophy in Dante
- 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
