Dante in America: Eliot and the Politics of Modernism
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https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.199911243Abstract
This essay looks at the politics of modernism and the politics of reading. Considering the elective affinity that seems to have existed between America and Dante, it focuses on T. S. Eliot's relationship to America and to nineteenth-century readings of Dante, and his desire to create a new, more authoritative Dante, derived in part from Maurras. This reading has become hegemonic in subsequent American criticism of Dante, particularly in relation to "allegory", as opposed to Auerbach's "figural" readings. The essay looks at both the positive and negative features of Eliot's reading, but asks how it may be possible now to go beyond it, and find a reading of Dante that is less bound up with an authoritarian politics.
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