Wordly Wise

Raffaele De Benedictis holds a PhD in Italian from the University of Toronto and is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University in Detroit. He teaches courses on Dante, literary criticism, and Italian culture. He is the author of Ordine e struttura musicale nella Divina Commedia (2000) and of various articles on Dante, semiotics, and Italian culture.

«This absolutely original research [...] employs so many of my semiotic concepts that I am afraid that my final judgments could be biased. I must in any case admit that De Benedictis’s enquiry on Dante represents, as far as I know, the first complete attempt to analyze the whole of Dante’s poetical achievements and theoretical views by using intensively the instruments provided by a text semiotics. I have particularly appreciated the unexpected meeting between Peirce and Dante. I think that this book can open a further fruitful discussion on the inexhaustible, endless Dantesque heritage. This is an open enquiry about the most open of all open works.» (Umberto Eco, University of Bologna)«Perhaps more rigorously than many previous studies, Raffaele De Benedictis’ book succeeds in capturing the novelty of Dante’s discourse. Basing himself on seminal theories of allegory as a discourse that overlaps with hermeneutics and calls into question the role of the reader, De Benedictis, in this splendid work that combines scholarship and a sense of complexity of literary texts, has written an excellent, exciting study of medieval semiotics.» (Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University)«Raffaele De Benedictis chooses to interpret and understand Dante’s work by submitting it to the filter of the semiotics of discourse. Heuristic and hermeneutic effects of the contemporary semiotic approach appear here so fully. It is not the semiotics of discourse that imposes rules and structures on Dante’s work, but the reverse occurs: artwork appears in all its innovative strength and in the creative power with which it imposes its law on the analysis grid. This is a great analysis, where the reader, installed at the heart of the work, witnesses the implementation of all cognitive and emotive requests addressed to him/her.» (Jacques Fontanille, University of Limoges, Institut Universitaire de France)