Dante and the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression

Jay Newman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph. His
books include Inauthentic Culture and Its Philosophical Critics and
Biblical Religion and Family Values.

This very large and distinctly unusual collection of essays on Dante’s
The Divine Comedy contains few papers by established Dante scholars, and
most of the contributions are somewhat idiosyncratic in theme or style.
The project developed in part out of the activities of an informal
discussion group of University of Western Ontario scholars from
different fields who met fortnightly from 1990 to 1997 to reflect on The
Divine Comedy; a conference was finally held in 1997. Several essays in
the volume are by students of the editor, James Miller, who teaches
Dante courses at Western on a regular basis. Miller, who is certainly an
original character, is all over the volume; he has not only written or
contributed to many of the papers, but is clearly the spirit behind the
entire enterprise.

The essays are fairly wide-ranging in scope but generally aim at
addressing Dante’s importance as a subversive figure who was engaged
in bringing to light phenomena suppressed by the church hierarchy. More
traditional critical studies include Amilcare A. Iannucci on Dante’s
Limbo, Guido Pugliese on alternative readings of canto 10, and Leon
Surette on Ezra Pound’s approach to Dante. The other essays are
exceedingly uneven in intellectual sophistication, effectiveness of
argument, and interest—as is to be expected in such a collection.
Several of these essays consider The Divine Comedy in relation to the
work of contemporary thinkers and artists, including Georges Bataille
and Stan Brakhage. If there is something self-indulgent about this
project, one can nevertheless derive satisfaction from the enthusiasm of
so many of the contributors; and while the volume is bloated with some
rather pretentious content, it will certainly stimulate some readers to
take their copy of The Divine Comedy off the bookshelf, dust it off, and
try to revive the delight and fascination it once gave them.