Dante's Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the 'Commedia' questions the familiar narrative arc at play in the writings of Dante Alighieri and opens his masterpiece to three alternative models that resist it. Dante's masterplot is the teleological trajectory by which the poet subordinates
the past to the authority of a new experience. The book analyses the masterplot's workings in Dante's text and its role in the interpretation of the poem, and it documents its overwhelming success in influencing readings of the Commedia over the centuries. The volume then explores three competing
narrative models that resist and counter its monopoly which are enacted by paradoxes, alternative endings and parallel lives, and the future. By focusing on these non-linear modes of storytelling and testing the limits of linear narration, the book questions critical paradigms in the scholarship of
the Commedia that favour a single normative master truth, exposes their problematic authoritarian implications, and highlights the manifold poetic, theological, and ethical tensions that are often neglected due to the masterplot's influence. The new picture of a vulnerable author and open-ended text
that emerges from this study thus doubles as a metacritical reflection on the state of the field. The book's impassioned argument is that, alongside established notions of his trademark plurality of linguistic registers and styles, Dante's narrative pluralism can, and should, come to play a key role
in contemporary and future readings of the Commedia.
Author(s): Nicolò Crisafi
Series: Oxford Modern Languages and Literature Monographs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 208
City: Oxford
Cover
Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the Commedia
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Contents
Editions, Translations, and Abbreviations
Figure
Introduction: Dante’s Masterplot
I.1 Keywords of the Masterplot
I.2 Masterplots and the Masterplot
I.3 The Cases of Vita nova and Commedia
I.4 Exemplariness, Credibility, Reproducibility
I.5 Reading Hermeneutic Writing
I.6 ‘The good’ and ‘the other things’
1: Paradox in the Poem
1.1 Paradox in the Middle Ages: Scholastic Theology and Mystical Writings
1.2 Oxymoron as ‘compact verbal paradox’
1.3 Long-range Paradox in the Commedia
1.4 Coexistence of Narrative Models of Teleology and Paradox
1.4.1 Teleological Plot and Paradoxical Content
1.4.2 The ‘Time’ of Antanaclasis
1.4.3 The Ineffability Topos
1.5 The Role of the Reader
2: Alternative Endings and Parallel Lives
2.1 The Affective Space: Paradiso VIII
2.2 The ‘Disnarrated’ and Free Will in the Commedia: a Comparison with Two Twentieth-century Poems and the Convivio
2.3 ‘La tecnica dell’episodio parallelo’: Parallel Lives as Narrative Correlative of Alternative Endings
2.4 Interpreting Alternative Endings and Parallel Lives: Paradiso XIII
2.5 Secret as Narrative Freedom
3: The Future In/Out of the Commedia
3.1 Poeta Writing into the Future
3.2 The Proems of the Poem
3.3 Unfinished Writing
3.4 Vulnerable Narrator, Vulnerable Text
3.5 Future’s Messes in the Inferno
3.6 The Ageing Author
3.7 Between Vulnerability and Performance: Paradiso XXV
Epilogue: Dante’s Narrative Pluralism
Bibliography
Index of Passages
Index of Names
Index of Concepts
