CFP: Metamorphosing Dante

Call for Papers: Metamorphosing Dante
ICI-Berlin, 24-26 September 2009
Organizers: Manuele Gragnolati (Oxford/Berlin), Fabio Camilletti (Berlin), Fabian Lampart (Freiburg)

"After almost seven centuries, Dante persists and even seems to haunt the present. Dante has been used, rewritten, and metamorphosed through manifold media and cultural productions; the image itself of Dante has provided many paradigms for being (or performing the role of) a poet, indiscriminately shifting from the civic to the love poet, from the language experimenter to the engaged poet-philosopher, or from the bard of a ‘sublime’ Inferno to that of heavenly rarefaction. This conference will investigate what so many authors, artists and thinkers from such different artistic, political, geographical, and cultural backgrounds have found in Dante in the 20th and 21st centuries. Certainly, Dante’s work can provide multiple linguistic and narrative structures, characters and stories, thereby allowing a wide range of possibilities to be evoked and re-activated. However, after the somewhat a-critical, sometimes Kitsch tribute paid to Dante during the Romantic period – excesses against which the scholarly tradition of Dante studies intentionally constituted itself – Dante’s oeuvre has become a more challenging and interrogative presence. It has become a floating, sometimes subterranean, certainly complex influence, and each re-appropriation also inquires, somehow moving forward with a backwards gaze, into its own Weltanschauung, including such crucial elements as subjectivity, language, politics, desire, and utopia.

The hypothesis that this conference seeks to pursue is that the 20th and 21st centuries have found in Dante a field of tension, in which they can mirror, explore, and question the tensions of their own realities. Situated itself on critical points of tension (sermo humilis/sublimis, lyric/epic, life/afterlife, human/divine, present/future…), Dante’s aspiration towards totality remains a daunting presence in the age of fragmentation. After the ‘death of the Author’, Dante’s work seduces precisely as the site of a powerful production of authorship: in its own critical engagement with biblical and classical works, it gives birth to the author in a modern sense by appropriating their authority and charging it with a strongly subjective dimension imbued with experience, memory, and desire. The conference invites scholars and artists coming from different disciplines and cultures to explore what the 20th and 21st centuries have looked for in Dante’s works, and the ways in which they have engaged with them through rewritings, dialogues, and transposition in order to reflect upon their own tensions.

Metamorphosing Dante is conceived within the frame of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry’s core project Tension/Spannung, whose aim is to explore the manifold role of tension from a pluridisciplinary approach through the interactions of artists and scholars from different backgrounds. This conference aims to investigate Dante’s tensions with the same openness in inquiry, focusing on their adaptability to all possible metamorphoses undergone by Dante in the 20th and 21st centuries."