Book Sectionhttps://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_20
Davide Luglio
‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’
Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis
Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a letter sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that ‘la questione di Dante è importantissima’. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two attempts to rewrite the Commedia: La Mortaccia and La Divina Mimesis. La Mortaccia is an unfinished text from 1959 written as free indirect speech in Roman dialect, in which the author tells the story of a prostitute. Walking at night along the Via Tiburtina, she meets three ‘canacci lupi’, which she tries in vain to escape. Eventually Dante comes to her rescue and takes her to the Rebibbia jail. But by 1963, Pasolini had already left behind the project of La Mortaccia and its linguistic perspective, dependent on the legacy of the fifties. In that year he mentioned La Divina Mimesis for the first time. In the seventh section of Poesia in forma di rosa (‘Progetto di opere future’), it is described as ‘opera, se mai ve ne fu, da farsi’:
Keywords: Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia; productive reception; Italian literature; Pasolini, Pier Paolo – La divina mimesis; allegory; authenticity (Philosophy) in literature
Rights: © by the author(s). This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
| Title |
‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’
|
| Subtitle |
Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis
|
| Author(s) |
Davide Luglio
|
| Identifier | |
| Description |
Early in his life Pasolini showed interest in Dante: in a letter sent to Luciano Serra in 1945, he declared that ‘la questione di Dante è importantissima’. He later reaffirmed his interest in Dante in two attempts to rewrite the Commedia: La Mortaccia and La Divina Mimesis. La Mortaccia is an unfinished text from 1959 written as free indirect speech in Roman dialect, in which the author tells the story of a prostitute. Walking at night along the Via Tiburtina, she meets three ‘canacci lupi’, which she tries in vain to escape. Eventually Dante comes to her rescue and takes her to the Rebibbia jail. But by 1963, Pasolini had already left behind the project of La Mortaccia and its linguistic perspective, dependent on the legacy of the fifties. In that year he mentioned La Divina Mimesis for the first time. In the seventh section of Poesia in forma di rosa (‘Progetto di opere future’), it is described as ‘opera, se mai ve ne fu, da farsi’:
|
| Is Part Of | |
| Place |
Vienna
|
| Publisher |
Turia + Kant
|
| Date |
2011
|
| Subject |
Alighieri, Dante – Divina Commedia
productive reception
Italian literature
Pasolini, Pier Paolo – La divina mimesis
allegory
authenticity (Philosophy) in literature
|
| Rights |
© by the author(s)
This version is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
|
| Bibliographic Citation |
Davide Luglio, ‘‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis’, 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. 339–53 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_20>
|
| Language |
en-GB
|
| page start |
339
|
| page end |
353
|
| 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. 339–53
|
| Format |
application/pdf
|
References
- Grazzini, Filippo, ‘Esperienze di lettori novecenteschi d’eccezione: Montale e Pasolini davanti a Dante’, in ‘Per correr miglior acque ...’: Bilanci e prospettive degli studi danteschi alle soglie del nuovo millennio, Atti del Convegno internazionale di Verona-Ravenna 25–29 ottobre 1999, 2 vols (Rome: Salerno, 2001), ii, pp. 899–915
- Laurencin, Hervé Joubert, ‘Pasolini–Barthes: engagement et suspension de sens’, Studi Pasoliniani, 1 (2007), pp. 55–67
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Lettere 1940–1954 (Turin: Einaudi, 1986)
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Lettere 1955–1975 (Turin: Einaudi, 1988)
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Romanzi e racconti, ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1998)
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Saggi sulla letteratura e sull’arte, ed. by Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1999)
- Pasolini, Pier Paolo, Tutte le poesie, ed. by Graziella Chiarcossi and Walter Siti, 2 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 2003)
- Squarotti, Giorgio Bàrberi, ‘L’ultimo trentennio’, in Dante nella letteratura italiana del Novecento, ed. by Silvio Zennaro (Rome: Bonacci, 1979), pp. 245–77
- Tricomi, Antonio, Pasolini: gesto e maniera (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2005)
Cite as:
Davide Luglio, ‘‘Anzichè allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis’, 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. 339–53 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_20>