Introduction

The Jewish, Budapest-born writer Giorgio Pressburger, one of the most interesting contemporary novelists in Europe, does not write in his native Hungarian but in adoptive Italian, and has often reflected about this linguistic choice. His most recent novel, Nel regno oscuro (2008), is inspired by Dante’s Inferno, and describes a journey to Hell which is both a meditation on XX-century history – and the Shoah in particular – and a psychoanalytical attempt, guided by Sigmund Freud, to come to terms with the loss of the author’s dead father and twin brother.

Already in 1929 Erich Auerbach highlighted the innovative character of Dante’s oeuvre which, in contrast with its traditional interpretation as the culmination and summa of a medieval Weltanschauung, he associated with a modern representation of the human being in its individuality and historical reality. This conference gathered scholars from different disciplines (literary studies, history, linguistics, philosophy, queer theory, theatre) to discuss the role that language plays for Dante. In particular, the question with which this conference engaged is to what extent Dante’s linguistic theory and praxis, which can be understood in terms of a strenuous defense of the vernacular language, in tension with the prestige of Latin, both informs and reflects a new constellation of  authority, knowledge and identity, which is imbued with a significant element of subjectivity and opens up towards modernity. The conference also included a dialogue with Giorgio Pressburger on his recent Nel regno oscuro and a performance based on Dante and Pasolini.