a lecture by Dr Daragh O’Connell
Dante’s text still exerts a powerful hold on the western imagination today. This lecture will examine how this influence is manifest in
decidedly popular forms of culture: from comic books, computer games,
crime novels, tv shows to Hollywood blockbusters – Dante is
re-appropriated, adapted, refashioned and in many ways distorted. These
cultural products tell us more about our own concerns in society today
than they do about Dante’s enduring masterpiece. From Dan Brown’s Inferno to Mad Men’s Don Draper, via Hannibal and Se7en, each one invokes a (partial) Dante for its own ends.Dr Daragh O’Connell is a lecturer in Italian literature at University College Cork. His research specialisms include the poetics of Dante’s Commedia,
Giambattista Vico and autobiography as well as modern and contemporary
Sicilian literature, with a particular focus on the narrative of
Vincenzo Consolo.