The Undivine Comedy

Possibilities of Lyric

“…11 The fact that the poem lacks a congedo (the leave-taking that usually concludes a canzone) -a feature which is unusual within the Rvf and occurs in only one other poem (105)can also be read formally as a sign of this apparent opening up to what follows and as a projection forwards. 12 Therefore, for Kay and Santagata (but also for many others), the fact that canzone 70 ends with a quotation from Rvf 23 is the sign of a 'subjective transformation' and a move beyond the domain of the earlier lyric. 13 Instead, our interpretation is in tune with the more ambivalent reading that Rosanna Bettarini and Marco Praloran have given of Rvf 70, and proposes that the quotations from the previous poems do not mark a complete departure but function as traces of desire that are reactivated in and by the text.…”

“…11 In particular we would like to develop the connection between Braidotti's concept of the 'di-vidual' or open subject, the vegetal, and the idea that it represents an intensification of desire. 12 In this sense, passivity is the possibility of 'an affective, de-personalized, highly receptive subject', 13 which is the closest Petrarch's 'I' gets to a form of dispossession (which the ego usually resists) and corresponds, as we have begun to suggest, to an experience of desire not so as 'a singularity bounded by its own powers to endure intensities and relations to others' (n. 9, p. 183). 13 Braidotti,'Intensive Genre',p.…”

“…11 In the poem this defeat of reason in Love's arena is expressed through two main metaphors: the lover being ridden by Love as a horse (which recalls the common image of old Aristotle being ridden by Phyllis), and the useless ringing of bells during a storm (which anticipates the 'bufera infernal' of Inferno v). 12 This passivity culminates in the necessary acquiescence to Love's power that is expressed in the final tercet, where the noun 'piacere' hints that there is nonetheless something pleasurable in this abandon. 13 So while everything in Dante's sonnet is about compulsion and submission to love, what we find interesting is that there is not much room for overwhelming angst.…”

“…As we have already hinted, while Dante's sonnet conveyed the poetic subject's grasp of the matter of love and provided a lucid dissection of desire and its consequences with Scholastic precision, Petrarch's sonnet transitions back from the theoretical quest to the poetic subject's feeling and experience of love. The result is that the subject's knowledge is completely hindered and replaced by the typically Petrarchan condition of error -his boat is light on knowledge and heavy on error -which in turn becomes an existential impasse: 'Fra sì contrari venti in frale barca, | mi trovo in alto mar senza governo, | sì lieve di saver, d'error si carca, | ch'i' medesmo non so quel ch'io mi voglio, | e tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno' (10)(11)(12)(13)(14). 21 The Petrarchan 'I' is even more present than the already prominent 'I' that opened Dante's sonnet, but it stops being concerned with the theoretical understanding of love and capitulates instead to a state of confusion that takes it back to the sensations that gave rise to the investigation in the first place.…”

“Allegory of the theologians” or “allegory of the poets”: Allegory in Dante's Commedia

“…The question to be asked is, in Teodolinda Barolini's words: ''How are we to respond to the poet's insistence that he is telling the truth?'' 84 Has Dante built a complicated system of rhetorical approaches in order to hide the fictional character of the text, or, and this it yet another question which cannot be answered, but should be considered, has Dante himself believed the literal truth value of what he states as a literal truth?…”