The literary vision. Writing as theophany : the medium as metaphor for immediacy -- The presence of speech in writing : speaking as sparking -- The parts of speech : mediation and contingency -- From speculative grammar to visual spectacle and beyond -- Sense made sensuous and synaesthesia in the sight and sound of writing -- Infinite script : endless mediation as metaphor for divinity -- Philosophical reflections. Writing and visionary immediacy : mechanics and mysticism of the letter -- Saussure and the structuralist idea of language as a system of differences -- Temporalization and transcendence of time through language -- Transcendental reflection : time synthesis and the role of the "I" -- Unmanifest wholeness of sense : language as image of the imageless -- Transcendentality of language and the language of the other -- Appendix 1: Paradiso XVIII, 71-136, Italian text and English translation.
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.