Dante and the Making of a Modern Author

by Albert Russell Ascoli

Leading scholar Albert Russell Ascoli traces the metamorphosis of Dante Alighieri – minor Florentine aristocrat, political activist and exile, amateur philosopher and theologian, and daring experimental poet – into Dante, author of the Divine Comedy and perhaps the most self-consciously 'authoritative' cultural figure in the Western canon. The text offers a comprehensive introduction to Dante's evolving, transformative relationship to medieval ideas of authorship and authority from the early Vita Nuova through the unfinished treatises, The Banquet and On Vernacular Eloquence, to the works of his maturity, Monarchy and the Divine Comedy. Ascoli reveals how Dante anticipates modern notions of personalized, creative authorship and the phenomenon of 'Renaissance self-fashioning'. Unusually, the book examines Dante's career as a whole offering an important point of access not only to the Dantean oeuvre, but also to the history and theory of authorship in the larger Italian and European tradition.

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ascoli的剑桥但丁指南文章，我当年读时体验并不是最好的，但若干年后它却成了其中唯一我至今还记得观点并常常应用的篇目。相比之下，本书作为同一观点的全面阐述反而显得吃力，作者过度孤立了一个并非存在于研究对象之内、而是寄托于现代人视角的问题，导致它充满了过度解读、过度省略和故弄玄虚的论证细节，而且（我认为）作者自称的历史视角意味着他本该纳入许多其他中世纪和早期人文主义作品/作者的材料但实则并没有。不过尽管如此，我觉得它的核心观点仍然非常有用，不仅是但丁作为空前个人化但又坚决去历史化的半现代作者，还有他怎样在前期分裂作者和读者（评论者）身份来建构自己的权威，又在后期将两者重新融合来行使它。对许多文本细节的解读即使过度也很有启发，如《帝制论》的内部矛盾；Purg 19，22，27，28；Par 24-26。另外开头对但丁研究方法学问题的综述也非常好（虽然作者自己的新意似乎并没有他说的那么多但好吧大家都是这样的）。读到有关《论俗语》的一章，有些得意，因为我觉得其中引用的大部分学者解读都不如我的。这当然只是错觉，但还是让人感觉很好XD。