Authors: William Franke
ISBN-13: 9780226259970, ISBN-10: 0226259978
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Date Published: April 1996
Edition: 1
Critically engaging the thought of Heidegger, Gadamer, and others, William Franke contributes both to the criticism of Dante's Divine Comedy and to the theory of interpretation.
Reading the poem through the lens of hermeneutical theory, Franke focuses particularly on Dante's address to the reader as the site of a disclosure of truth. The event of the poem for its reader becomes potentially an experience of truth both human and divine. While contemporary criticism has concentrated on the historical character of Dante's poem, often insisting on it as undermining the poem's claims to transcendence, Franke argues that precisely the poem's historicity forms the ground for its mediation of a religious revelation. Dante's dramatization, on an epic scale, of the act of interpretation itself participates in the self-manifestation of the Word in poetic form.
Dante's Interpretive Journey is an indispensable addition to the field of Dante studies and offers rich insights for philosophy and theology as well.
Klein (philosophy, U. of Northern Florida-Jacksonville) offers an analysis of modern-day feminism and a personal memoir of coming of age and coming to terms with feminism as it relates to university politics and teaching. She presents a critique of contemporary feminism, discussing feminist and nonfeminist philosophy, feminist nonphilosophy, and feminist epistemology and pedagogy. She exposes the dogmas and fallacies of feminism, and argues that feminism is oppressive to women. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Preface | ||
Introduction: Truth and interpretation in the Divine Comedy | 1 | |
1 | Historicity of Truth | 5 |
2 | Truth through Interpretation and the Hermeneutic of Faith | 14 |
3 | Interpretive Ontology: Dante and Heidegger | 23 |
Ch. 1 | The Address to the Reader | 37 |
1 | The Ontological Import of the Address to the Reader | 37 |
2 | Reader's Address as Scene of the Production of Sense | 51 |
3 | Truth, Sendings, Being-Addressed: Deconstruction versus Hermeneutics or Dialogue with Derrida? | 62 |
4 | A Philological Debate: Auerbach and Spitzer | 71 |
5 | Petrarch, Boccaccio, and the Fiction of Philology | 76 |
Ch. 2 | Dante's Hermeneutic Rite of Passage: Inferno IX | 82 |
1 | Blockage | 82 |
2 | Passage | 100 |
3 | Ambiguities | 109 |
4 | Appendix: Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and the Meaning of a Modern Understanding of Dante | 113 |
Ch. 3 | The Temporality of Conversion | 119 |
1 | Interpretation as Ontological Repetition and Dante's Fatedness | 119 |
2 | Ecstatic and Repetitive Temporality | 128 |
3 | Phenomenology of Fear/Anxiety in Inferno I | 135 |
4 | Dantesque Allegory and the Act of Understanding | 144 |
Ch. 4 | The Making of History | 152 |
1 | Relocating Truth: From Historical Sense to Reader's Historicity | 152 |
2 | Reality and Realism in Purgatorio X | 171 |
3 | Some History (and a Reopening) of the Question of the Truth of the Commedia | 177 |
Ch. 5 | Resurrected Tradition and Revealed Truth | 191 |
1 | Dante's Statius | 191 |
2 | Hermeneutics, Historicity, and Suprahistorical Truth | 224 |
Recapitulatory Prospectus: A New Hermeneutic Horizon for Religious Revelation in Poetic Literature? | ||
Core Bibliography of Recurrently Cited Sources | 239 | |
Index | 243 |