AvantDante: the Reception of Dante in 1945-2001 US Avantgarde Poetic Communities

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AvantDante offers the first systematic study of the translation and reception history of Dante Alighieri’s works and persona in the US avantgarde poetic communities between 1945-2001. The variety of poetic practices that emerged over this period is characterized by an experimental approach to composition and a sensitivity to the resistance of a text to closure, through extensive use of translation, parody, and pastiche. This project adopts a reader-oriented perspective and a transdisciplinary methodology to argue that the conspicuous degree of interaction by avantgarde poets with the figure and works of Dante constitutes a means to community creation, at a time when responses to (including rejection of) dominant and received modes of poetry was performed through an eclectic engagement with the modernist cultural legacy and a metatextual reflection on poetic language itself. AvantDante makes use of archival and digital tools to revivify a heterogeneous corpus of print evidence from public, national, and university libraries, special collections, and archives in the US; it deploys elements of philological and textual analysis to explore cultural metamorphosis, reappropriation, translation, and transmission; and it blends literary, socio-historical, material and digital approaches to map, visualize and convey an innovative and comprehensive reconstruction of these avantgarde movements as eclectic circles or communities of readers and mediators of Dante. Further, in exploring cultural appurtenance, linguistic identity, and translation practices through a lens of Dantean reception, problematising the larger project of constructing a specifically “American” literary idiom and explicit or implicit dialogue between poetic communities, this research will provide the first literary-historical overview of the legacy of modernist Dantean translation experiments in avantgarde American poetry