Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda
Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to
the Divine Comedy. Not aimed at excising theological concerns from
Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic
guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in
theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the
poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of
mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to
forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante
masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to
those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her
investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet,
the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the
transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in
which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights,
Ulyssean.