Dante and the Other brings together noted and emerging Dante scholars with theologians, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and psychotherapists, bridging the Florentine’s premodern world to today’s postmodern context. Exploring how alterity has become a potent symbol in religion, philosophy, politics, and culture, this book will be of interest to many related fields.
The book offers a thorough foundation in approaching Dante as proto-phenomenologist. It includes an informative review of literature, historical insight into Dante’s poetics-toward-ineffability as alternative to modern scientism, a foray into science fiction, existential elaborations, phenomenological analyses of Inferno’s Canto I, and applications to psychotherapy and qualitative research. It also contains a poem from an imagined Virgil retiring in Limbo, and a meditation on Dante’s complicated relationship to homosexuality.
Dante and the Other presents the mystical passion of apophatic spirituality, the millennia-spanning Augustinianism of radical orthodoxy, Levinas, Heidegger, and many others—all driven by Dante’s Labors of Love. It is essential reading for Dante scholars, as well as readers interested in his works.
List of Contributors
Preface: The Labors of Love
Acknowledgments: A Note of Gratitude for Support of this Work
Part I: Dante and Phenomenology
1. Introduction, Dante and Phenomenology: A Review of Literature
Aaron B. Daniels
2. Representing the Other: Dante, Duns Scotus, and the Crisis of Representation in the Modern Age
William Franke
3. 1321: A Space Odyssey: A Response to Franke
Aaron B. Daniels
4. Dante, Selfhood and Significant Journeying
John Took
5. A Response to Took’s "Dante, selfhood and significant journeying"
Dorothy Chang
6. From Poetics to Phenomenology: Consciousness in Dante’s Divine Comedy
Christian Y. Dupont
7. Gateways to the Ineffable: Dante’s Poetry as Proto-Phenomenology
Aaron B. Daniels
Part II: Dante: Yesterday, Today, and Forever
8. When Bici Said Come
Hattie Myers
9. Dante and the Medieval ‘Other’
Peter S. Hawkins
10. Surprised by Grace: Hermeneutic Reflections on Dante’s Judgments, A Response to Hawkins
James M. Kee
11. Purgatorio: A Liturgy of Forgiveness and Restoration
Dominic Aquila
12. Storytelling: Dante, Freud, and their Models of Eros
Hattie Myers
13. Purgatory as a Metaphor for Therapy and Associated Ethical Implications
K. L. McFarland and Tommy Givens
14. Dante’s Economy of Words after Marx
Matthew Elmore
Index
Biography
Aaron B. Daniels is a Research Fellow at Psychology & the Other at Boston College, and a Senior Lecturer of Psychology at Curry College. His publications include Jungian Crime Scene Analysis: An Imaginal Investigation (2014), and Imaginal Reality, Volumes 1 & 2 (2011). Before entering academia, he practiced clinical psychology for ten years in community and private practice, where he achieved LGBT specialist status.
