The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso

The Metaphysics of Representation

William Franke

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English

Cambridge University Press
27 July 2023

In Canto XVIII of Paradiso, Dante sees thirty-five letters of Scripture - LOVE JUSTICE, YOU WHO RULE THE EARTH - 'painted' one after the other in the sky. It is an epiphany that encapsulates the Paradiso, staging its ultimate goal - the divine vision. This book offers a fresh, intensive reading of this extraordinary passage at the heart of the third canticle of the Divine Comedy. While adapting in novel ways the methods of the traditional lectura Dantis, William Franke meditates independently on the philosophical, theological, political, ethical, and aesthetic ideas that Dante's text so provocatively projects into a multiplicity of disciplinary contexts. This book demands that we question not only what Dante may have meant by his representations, but also what they mean for us today in the broad horizon of our intellectual traditions and cultural heritage.

By: William Franke
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781009016919
ISBN 10: 1009016911
Pages: 324
Publication Date: 27 July 2023
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Part I. The Literary Vision; 1. Writing as Theophany: The Medium as Metaphor for Immediacy; 2. The Presence of Speech in Writing: Speaking as Sparking; 3. The Parts of Speech: Mediation and Contingency; 4. From Speculative Grammar to Visual Spectacle and Beyond; 5. Sense Made Sensuous and Synaesthesia in the Sight and Sound of Writing; 6. Infinite Script: Endless Mediation as Metaphor for Divinity; Part II. Philosophical Reflections; I. Language as Concocted of Letters versus the Mysticism of the Name; II. Saussure and the Structuralist Idea of Language as a System of Differences; III. Temporalization and Transcendence of Time through Language; IV. Transcendental Reflection: Time Synthesis and the Role of the 'I'; V. Unmanifest Wholeness of Sense: Language as Image of the Imageless; VI. Transcendentality of Language and the Language of the Other.

William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature and Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University and Visiting Professor at the University of Navarra. He is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has been Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and Study of Religions. His books include Dante's Interpretive Journey (1996), On What Cannot Be Said (2007), Poetry and Apocalypse (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013), A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014), The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante (2015), Secular Scriptures: Modern Theological Poetics in the Wake of Dante (2016), A Theology of Literature (2017), On the Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020).

Reviews for The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation

'This is a brilliant and enjoyable book. With sharp interdisciplinary acumen, Franke provides lucid and creative readings that offer original and fruitful perspectives on Dante's Commedia, highlighting its relevance for contemporary studies in theology, philosophy and literature. The Divine Vision of Dante's Paradiso compellingly shows how Dante's bold and experimental writing can, even for us today, vivify in striking ways reflection on truth and its mediation.' Vittorio Montemaggi, King's College London 'This book possesses the outstanding qualities one has come to expect from Franke's scholarship: broad and deep mastery of the Western philosophical and theological traditions; attentive, nuanced, and fecund literary analysis; a crystal-clear, jargon-free, economical, elegant, and at times lyrical prose; a searching and intelligent devotion to groundbreaking inquiry. In Franke's view, Dante's longed-for vision of God is nothing other than his vision of Letters - of Writing that, in keeping with the doctrine of Incarnation, both is and is not God. Such Writing is not human but is revelation: it shows God visibly, yet at the same time it is not God's essence as the Absolute and the Infinite.' Gregory B. Stone, Louisiana State University 'Franke seeks to interpret Dante's vision of writing in ways that make it available to philosophical analysis and speculative contemplation, methods aesthetic and spiritual at the same time. Such connections offer important resources for philosophical and theological reflections that resonate 'in the excruciating dilemmas of [the] present cultural predicament' ... Highly recommended.' D. Pesta, Choice Connect