Faust and Dante: knowledge and allegory

• Published in: Neohelicon (Budapest) Vol. 39; no. 1; pp. 31 - 38
• Main Author: Verdicchio, Massimo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer Netherlands 01-06-2012; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Alighieri, Dante (1265-1321); Comparative Literature; Connotation; Cultural and Media Studies; Epistemology; German literature; Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749-1832); Italian literature; Literary criticism; Literature; Poetics; Poetry; Theme; Commedia; Faust; Allegory; Ulysses; Dante; Goethe
• ISSN: 0324-4652; 1588-2810
• DOI: 10.1007/s11059-012-0135-z

Dante’s
Commedia
and Goethe’s
Faust
, two classics of World literature seem worlds apart. One is a medieval work with deep religious connotations and an obsolete poetics, while the other is a modern epic that deals with the predicament of the individual at the dawn of a new technological and capitalist era. Yet, these differences are essentially historical and do not affect the way in which both works communicate as poetic representations. At this level, in fact, they are very much comparable, as I will try to show. These two works have in common not only the fundamental theme of the “quest for knowledge”, but they also share what is necessarily and inevitably the representational mode of any great poetic work: the mode of allegory.