Dante's "Inferno" and Walter Benjamin's cities : considerations of place, experience, and media
- When Walter Benjamin wrote his main texts, the theme of the city as hell was extremely popular. Some of his German contemporaries, such as Brecht or Döblin, also used it. Benjamin was aware of these examples, as well as of examples outside Germany, including Joyce's "Ulysses" and Baudelaire's "poetry". And he was - at least in some way - familiar with Dante's "Inferno" and used it, and in particular Dante's conception of hell, for his own purposes. Benjamin's appropriation of the topos of the Inferno has been seen as a critique of capitalism and as a general critique of modernism by means of allegory. In the following analysis, Angela Merte-Rankin takes a slightly different approach and, despite Benjamin's status as an expert on allegory, considers hell in its literal sense as a place and examines the issues of implacement that might follow from this standpoint.
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| Author: | Angela Merte-Rankin |
|---|---|
| URN: | urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-516321 |
| URL: | https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-02/merte-rankin_benjamin_s-cities.pdf |
| DOI: | https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-02_05 |
| ISBN: | 978-3-85132-617-8 |
| ISSN: | 2627-731X |
| Parent Title (English): | 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 |
| Publisher: | Turia + Kant |
| Place of publication: | Wien |
| Document Type: | Part of a Book |
| Language: | English |
| Date of Publication (online): | 2019/10/30 |
| Year of first Publication: | 2011 |
| Publishing Institution: | Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg |
| Release Date: | 2019/11/20 |
| Tag: | Eschatology; Hell (theology); Productive reception |
| GND Keyword: | Dante Alighieri; Inferno; Rezeption; Benjamin, Walter; Hölle <Motiv>; Stadt <Motiv>; Topografie |
| Page Number: | 11 |
| First Page: | 77 |
| Last Page: | 87 |
| HeBIS-PPN: | 456536051 |
| Dewey Decimal Classification: | 8 Literatur / 80 Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft / 800 Literatur und Rhetorik |
| 8 Literatur / 83 Deutsche und verwandte Literaturen / 830 Literaturen germanischer Sprachen; Deutsche Literatur | |
| Sammlungen: | Germanistik / GiNDok |
| CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft | |
| CompaRe | Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft / ICI Berlin | |
| BDSL-Klassifikation: | 17.00.00 20. Jahrhundert (1914-1945) / BDSL-Klassifikation: 17.00.00 20. Jahrhundert (1914-1945) > 17.18.00 Zu einzelnen Autoren |
| Licence (German): |  Creative Commons - Namensnennung-Weitergabe unter gleichen Bedingungen |
