Pasolini after Dante

Taylor & Francis

What role did Dante play in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)? His unfinished and fragmented imitation of the Comedia, La Divina Mimesis, is only one outward sign of what was a sustained dialogue with Dante on representation begun in the early 1950s. During this period, the philologists Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990) and Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) played a crucial role in Pasolini\u2019s re-thinking of \u2018represented reality\u2019, suggesting Dante as the best literary, authorial and political model for a generation of postwar Italian writers. This emerged first as \u2018Dantean realism\u2019 in Pasolini\u2019s prose and poetry, after Contini\u2019s interpretation of Dante and of his plurilingualism, and then as \u2018figural realism\u2019 in his cinema, after Auerbach\u2019s concepts of Dante\u2019s figura and \u2018mingling of styles\u2019. Following the evolution of Pasolini\u2019s mimetic ideal from these formative influences through to La Divina Mimesis, Emanuela Pa.