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Sarah Horn Ausblick: Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere
Sarah Horn, ‘Ausblick: Transition from Nowhere to Nowhere’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 323-33 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_5>
2025
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Sarah Horn (Selbst-)Dokumentarische Praktiken und trans* Archive
Sarah Horn, ‘(Selbst-)Dokumentarische Praktiken und trans* Archive’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 277-321 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_4>
2025
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Sarah Horn Testosteron, Medien, Männlichkeiten
Sarah Horn, ‘Testosteron, Medien, Männlichkeiten’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 189-275 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_3>
2025
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Sarah Horn Testo-Transitionen differenzieren – trans* Geschlechtlichkeit und Rassifizierungen
Sarah Horn, ‘Testo-Transitionen differenzieren – trans* Geschlechtlichkeit und Rassifizierungen’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 117-88 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_2>
2025
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Sarah Horn Zweimal durch die Pubertät – Transition auf YouTube
Sarah Horn, ‘Zweimal durch die Pubertät – Transition auf YouTube’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 27-116 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_1>
2025
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Sarah Horn Einleitung: Transition und queere Zeitlichkeiten
Sarah Horn, ‘Einleitung: Transition und queere Zeitlichkeiten’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 1-25 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_0>
2025
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Sarah Horn Vorwort
Sarah Horn, ‘Vorwort’, in Sarah Horn, trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs, Cultural Inquiry, 38 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), p. vii-xi <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-38_00>
2025
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Sarah Horn trans* Werden: Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs
Das Buch trans* Werden. Queere Zeitlichkeiten und Transitionen in Videoblogs widmet sich in einer medienwissenschaftlichen Analyse ausgewählten Videos von trans* Videobloggern, die ihre geschlechtlichen Transitionen in den 2010er Jahren auf YouTube dokumentieren. In selbstdokumentarischen Praktiken verbunden mit den Wirkungen des Testosterons auf die Körper offenbart sich trans* Sein als ein komplexes und ungewisses Werden, das in medialer Umgebung als queere Zeitlichkeit erfahrbar wird. Hierbei stehen die Effekte der Mediatisierung im Fokus der Analyse.
2025 | Cultural Inquiry, 38. Transgender; Gender; Testosteron; Männlichkeit; Race; YouTube; Queer Theory; Medien und Geschlecht; Transition; Vlog
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Joan Ferrante On Reading The Undivine Comedy Thirty Years Later
Joan Ferrante, ‘On Reading The Undivine Comedy Thirty Years Later’, in A World of Possibilities: The Legacy of The Undivine Comedy, ed. by Kristina M. Olson, Cultural Inquiry, 37 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2025), pp. 369-70 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-37_19>
2025. paradox; narrative; Alighieri, Dante; terza rima; enjambement
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Roberta Antognini Translating The Undivine Comedy
Since a scholarly work is a kind of translation, translating it can be harder than literature. It requires interdisciplinary knowledge, aesthetic sensitivity, and the ability to hear the author’s voice. While translating The Undivine Comedy, I felt I was reliving my student days in the eighties, listening to Barolini at NYU. Revisiting my work now, I focus on Geryon — the ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna — to reflect on the complex, possibly menzognero process from which a new text emerges from the original.
2025. translation; non-fiction translation; translator’s invisibility; Geryon; Jakobson, Roman
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Akash Kumar From Detheologizing to Decolonizing: Toward a Reading of Dante and Alterity
This essay builds on Barolini’s fundamental insight that new readings of Dante’s Commedia can emerge when we read the text apart from its overdetermined aim. I posit that decolonizing is a form of detheologizing, linking Barolini’s meditation on narrative difference to Dante’s interest in cultural difference and moving outward to consider the Commedia through the lens of the Caribbean poetic adaptations of Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison.
2025. Dante; Decolonizing; Derek Walcott; Lorna Goodison; Salman Rushdie
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F. Regina Psaki The Role of the Reader in Actualizing the Commedia
Chapter 8 of Barolini’s Undivine Comedy examines Dante’s concrete, poetic representation of his immaterial nonlinguistic paradise. Exploring Paradiso’s content and making, its author’s fashioning of self and poem within its audience, I argue that the way Dante projects the Commedia into its readers echoes this reconciliation of opposites. Mary Jo Bang’s translations exemplify the Commedia’s self-perpetuation in new generations of readers, making us soundboxes in which it resonates and persists.
2025. Dante; Paradiso; Undivine Comedy; reader response; translation; Bang, Mary Jo
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Manuele Gragnolati Heavenly Paradoxes and Their Pleasures
This chapter discusses how The Undivine Comedy unveils an unexpected appreciation of alterity in Paradiso, which mobilizes a paradoxical coexistence of unity and difference by combining narrative and lyrical modes and ending with a ‘jumping textuality’ that conveys the heavenly totum simul. In dialogue with feminist and queer scholars, in particular Julia Kristeva and Leo Bersani, it argues that this textuality replicates the paradoxical pleasure not only of losing but also of finding oneself.
2025. desire; body; difference; temporality; aesthetics; nostalgia; reading
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Elena Lombardi In Praise of Detheologizing
This essay argues that Barolini’s concept and practice of detheologizing is still much needed today in Dante Studies, as the poem and the discipline continue to be under threat by the assumption that the theological and religious reading are the main (if not the sole) readings possible, and that ‘God’ proffers the answer to the tensions, the errors, the grey areas, the unknowns, the pleasures, and the resistance of the poem.
2025. detheologizing; philology and theology; Inferno 5
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Julie Van Peteghem Ovidio senza Dio: Ovidian Myth and Sexual Violence in the Commedia
This essay examines medieval reader responses to representations of sexual violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Focusing in particular on the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, I illustrate Dante’s different, ‘detheologized’ reading approach in respect to medieval commentaries on the Metamorphoses. While medieval commentators gloss over rape and sexual assault, focusing instead on the myth’s moral meanings, in the Commedia Dante directly confronts the sexual violence prevalent in Ovid’s poem.
2025. sexual violence; Ovid; myth; Hermaphroditus; Dante; medieval commentary
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Lina Bolzoni Dante and ‘visibile parlare’
This essay takes its cue from Barolini's metapoetic reading of the terrace of the proud. It analyses some of the ways in which Dante himself seeks to achieve a ‘visibile parlare’, in a kind of competition with the divine. The point of view is primarily that of reception, of how the pact that the poet creates with his readers is realized. The canto of the proud is thus inserted into that education of the gaze that is an important component of the poem.
2025. synesthesia; memory; acrostic; competition
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Zygmunt G. Barański Divining The Undivine Comedy: Reflections and Recollections
My chapter has three intertwined aims: (i) to assess the significance and originality of The Undivine Comedy and counter the (often) partial and erroneous ways in which Dantists have referred to and made use of the book; (ii) to demonstrate Barolini’s intellectually and critically independent standing as a scholar of Dante in international terms; and (iii) to give examples of how The Undivine Comedy has influenced my research and thinking on Dante, while reflecting on my friendship with Teo that now spans nearly forty years.
2025. modern Dante studies; textuality; narrative; verisimilitude; Dante’s Poets; Singleton; Paradiso; religious poetry
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Giuseppe Ledda Prophetic Models and Structures in an Undivine Comedy
The cantos devoted to the Terrestrial Paradise in Dante’s Comedy are crucial in the process of self-representation of the poet’s prophetic identity. To establish such a prophetic authority, he explicitly alludes to many scriptural prophets and visionaries. Starting from a reading of Chapter 7 of The Undivine ‘Comedy’, the article reflects on the ways in which such ‘theological’ claims and allusions could be interpreted in a ‘detheologized’ approach to Dante’s poem.
2025. David; St. Paul; the Bible; prophecy
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Grace Delmolino Dante’s Lucy in the Canon Law of Consent
St. Lucy, a fourth-century martyr, is key to the theological and legal treatment of consent in Christianity. The life of Lucy tells how she resisted gang rape by asserting the holy power of her consent. In the Middle Ages, Gratian and Aquinas use her story to explore violence, compulsion and free will. This essay analyzes Lucia of Dante’s Commedia in the context of canon law, placing Lucia in a genealogy of women — Beatrice, Francesca, Piccarda — whom Dante uses to raise issues of consent and will.
2025. consent; rape; free will; Canon Law; Lucy (Lucia); Gratian; Aquinas
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George Dameron Dante’s War: Exiles, carestia, and Conflict in the Florentine Countryside, 1301–1304
During two years of public service (1300 and 1301), Dante was engaged in initiatives to ensure food (grain) security for Florence. However, as a signatory of the San Godenzo accord in June of 1302, the exiled Dante joined and helped lead the armed struggle by White Guelfs and Ghibellines in the Mugello valley to disrupt Florentine interests, particularly grain shipments, during the 1302–03 food crisis ( carestia). His involvement in this effort seems to contrast with certain aspects of the model of leadership that he developed in later works, including Convivio and the Commedia.
2025. exile; Guelfs; grain; food; priorate; carestia; Convivio; Mugello
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Alberto Casadei Teodolinda Barolini and the Signs of Newness in The Undivine Comedy
This article highlights some of the bold and innovative ideas presented in Teodolinda Barolini's The Undivine Comedy. It examines the question of the veracity or otherwise of the poem according to Dante and according to some of his authoritative interpreters. It then explores the importance of The Undivine Comedy and other works by Barolini for understanding the narrative modes employed by Dante. In so doing, it defines the special status, neither true nor false, of his major work.
2025. Truth; fiction; medieval narrative; medieval theology
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Nassime Chida Detheologize to Historicize
This essay argues that detheologizing — as theorized by Teodolinda Barolini — is the necessary precondition for historicizing Dante’s Commedia. By dismantling the interpretive habits shaped by Dante’s theological framework through a re-examination of the formal structures of the poem, detheologizing makes possible a systematic assessment of the significance of the historical context. This in turn allows for historicized readings that complicate traditional interpretations.
2025. detheologizing; historicizing; Farinata degli Uberti; Inferno 10; Guido da Montefeltro; Inferno 27
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Laura DiNardo Reasoning between Possibility, Fictional Reality, and Actuality: A Case Study in Detheologizing the Commedia’s Conditionals
This essay takes its inspiration from the detheologized approach of The Undivine Comedy to consider the role of conditional constructions in the Commedia. Inferno 9 and 27 are offered as case studies to consider how Dante-poet employs the linguistic structure of the conditional as a mechanism to consider possibility and its relation to fictional reality and actuality, thus grounding the truth value of his text in a precise semantic framework.
2025. philosophy of language; possibility; possible worlds; conditionals
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Roberto Antonelli The Undivine Comedy: Dante One and Multiple
I extend Barolini’s method by looking at other forms of ‘camouflaging’ through which Dante diverts our attention from his narrative art: the function of the great characters of the poem and their intertextual relations. The figures that populate the poem are united through the technique of memoria verborum: the ‘allusive art’, or intertextuality. It constitutes a principle that is not only structural but also narratological and aesthetic, establishing a second level of narration beyond the literal one.
2025. philology; narrative; Virgil; Beatrice; intertextuality