Book Sectionhttps://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_14
Manuele Gragnolati
Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah
Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro
Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt as restless and as passionately in love as the adulterous Paolo and Francesca in the ‘bufera infernal’ of Inferno V, but riding in a black cab to the (Italianized) rhythm of Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig; Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline as the three heads of a new Cerberus whose mixed pastiche of English, Norwegian, and French is an incomprehensible noise conveying nothing but hatred of the Jews; Primo Levi as a fallen angel taking the place of Lucifer at the very bottom of Hell: these are some of the surprises awaiting the reader of Giorgio Pressburger’s latest novel Nel regno oscuro (‘In/to the dark realm’), which is a rich and creative rewriting of Dante’s poem.Like all previous prose works by the 1937-born Hungarian Jewish author who emigrated to Italy in 1956, it is written not in his native Hungarian but in Italian. It is the first part of a planned trilogy inspired by the Divine Comedy, integrating the Middle European style of Pressburger’s previous works with the attempt to engage with the first part of Dante’s poem (of which Pressburger’s novel also seems to replicate the canonical apparatus of notes, in this case written by the author himself).
Keywords: Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia – Inferno; productive reception; Pressburger, Giorgio – Nel regno oscuro; subjectivity in literature; the unconscious (Psychology); History in literature; Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
Rights: © by the author(s). This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
| Title |
Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah
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| Subtitle |
Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro
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| Author(s) |
Manuele Gragnolati
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| Identifier | |
| Description |
Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt as restless and as passionately in love as the adulterous Paolo and Francesca in the ‘bufera infernal’ of Inferno V, but riding in a black cab to the (Italianized) rhythm of Goethe’s ballad Der Erlkönig; Ezra Pound, Knut Hamsun, and Louis-Ferdinand Céline as the three heads of a new Cerberus whose mixed pastiche of English, Norwegian, and French is an incomprehensible noise conveying nothing but hatred of the Jews; Primo Levi as a fallen angel taking the place of Lucifer at the very bottom of Hell: these are some of the surprises awaiting the reader of Giorgio Pressburger’s latest novel Nel regno oscuro (‘In/to the dark realm’), which is a rich and creative rewriting of Dante’s poem.Like all previous prose works by the 1937-born Hungarian Jewish author who emigrated to Italy in 1956, it is written not in his native Hungarian but in Italian. It is the first part of a planned trilogy inspired by the Divine Comedy, integrating the Middle European style of Pressburger’s previous works with the attempt to engage with the first part of Dante’s poem (of which Pressburger’s novel also seems to replicate the canonical apparatus of notes, in this case written by the author himself).
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| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Vienna
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| Publisher |
Turia + Kant
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| Date |
2011
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| Subject |
Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia – Inferno
productive reception
Pressburger, Giorgio – Nel regno oscuro
subjectivity in literature
the unconscious (Psychology)
History in literature
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
|
| Rights |
© by the author(s)
This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
|
| Bibliographic Citation |
Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 235–50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_14>
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| Language |
en-GB
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| page start |
235
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| page end |
250
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| Source |
Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 235–50
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| Format |
application/pdf
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References
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Cite as:
Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro’, in Metamorphosing Dante: Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Fabio Camilletti, and Fabian Lampart, Cultural Inquiry, 2 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2011), pp. 235–50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_14>