This event has been made possible with the generous support of the Anonymous fund, European Studies, the Department of French and Italian, and the Center for Interdisciplinary French Studies.
In the Divine Comedy, a close relationship between space and narrative is evident. This relationship sheds light on the text’s poetic and self-referential logic, in which the account of a journey through the afterlife, which includes a description of its topographical and topological nature, is combined with a meta-reflection on the capabilities of poetic language. Indeed, the work is intended to rival sacred scripture by poetic means, a notion expressed in multiple ways: through the rescue mission entrusted to the poet Virgil by Beatrice, who is a creation of the poet Dante; through the juxtaposition of the invocation to the Muses and Dante’s doubts regarding his ability to undertake the journey through the afterlife (Inf. II); through the elucidation of the topographical and topological nature of the realms of the afterlife; through the intertwining of the text’s narrative and the travelers’ spatial progression (e.g., the gate of Hell, the “città di Dite”). Thus, systematically, Dante’s text reflects on the anomaly of a living person’s journey through the afterlife and on the anomaly of the audacious undertaking of recounting such a journey by using the language of poetry.