Department of General and Comparative Literature
Subject: Deauthorizing Dante: Authorship and Readership between Dante and his 14th Century Poetic Heirs
Supervisor: Dr. Gur Zak
Abstract: Dante’s poetic authority and outstanding reputation is irrefutable today, however, in his days he was regarded as an experimental poet and amateur theologian and thinker whose status and literary abilities were questionable. Special attention was given to the authoritative tactics he employed in his Divine Comedy, in which he notably places himself as the heir of the classic literary tradition and casts Virgil as his guide and mentor, whom he will eventually surpass in the completion of his poetic and authoritative quest. One of the foremost techniques for attaining authority in his Commedia is indeed his ample use of Virgil’s epic, as he openly avails himself of Aeneas’s salvific journey to the new world and bases his own voyage upon this famous connotation, while also undermining the former text, reframing it so as to accommodate his own ideologies.
This successful authoritative technique unintentionally prompts Dante’s 14th century poetic heirs—namely, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer—to apply his method against him, as they use Dante’s fame and acclaim in order to substantiate their own positions as poets. Just like Dante negotiated his poetic authority vis-à-vis the Latin auctores, simultaneously validating Virgil’s poetry as well as negating his legacy and the classic tradition – his successors too employ the Commedia as foil for the construction of their auctoritas, both by relying on Dante’s established reputation and at the same time undermining his poetic choices.
This intriguing dynamic is the focus of this study, examined through two specific episodes which are rewritten by all three poets so as to challenge and question Dante’s authority and authorship.
Shachar is currently a postdoctoral fellow, pursuing research of the cross-cultural as well as intertextual relations between the Italian literary tradition of the 14th century and the Medieval English nascent culture.
Azrieli Stipend 2017/18
President Stipend 2015/16