Studies of Dante’s rhetoric and of Dante’s construction of his rhetorical authority in the Commedia have tended to follow one of two directions, either focusing on religious rhetoric, or approaching lay rhetoric as if it were completely technical and ideologically neutral. When scholars do write about civic rhetoric, they often dismiss it as something Dante simply rejects in his salvific scheme. However, Dante conceives of the poetry of the Commedia as rhetoric in the classical sense – that is, as discourse that aims at effecting change in the human polity – as well as in a Christian sense. In the poem, Dante assimilates the proto-humanist rhetorical theory of his time, which adapted Cicero and Horace’s rhetorics and poetics for the political and literary realities of the Medieval Italian city. In the Commedia, Dante does not disavow this civic rhetoric, but grants it a legitimate place in his Christian cosmos. This coexistence of the humanist and the Christian aspects of Dante’s rhetoric signifies that his attitude is not one of choosing one over the other, but of syncretism. Similarly, some of the ruptures that the Commedia supposedly enacts or contains – that between the Convivio and the Commedia, that between Virgil and the pilgrim, that beween the rigid stylistic hierarchy of Medieval literature and the stylistic pluralism of the Commedia – prove to have been exaggerated, in the face of a rhetorical continuity that exist between the two sides of these binaries. After showing the continuity both in rhetorical purpose and in reflections on rhetoric between the Convvio and the Commedia, the dissertation focuses on the image of the reburgeoning plant and the character Virgil, both of which are examples that the meta-rhetorical coexists with the moral and theological can exist simultaneously in the poem. The dissertation also proposes hitherto undocumented allusions to Horace’s Ars poetica and Vergil’s Georgics.
Chang, Wuming,
"Dante Orator of the Human City: Rhetoric, Proto-Humanism, and Cosmic Poetry in the Commedia"
(2017).
Italian Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0BG2MF1
