Dante’s Dantes: Self-Characterization in the Vita nova and Commedia

Although Dante Alighieri explicitly deems the act of writing about oneself inappropriate in the Convivio, his works are famously and overwhelmingly concerned with the biography, literary career, views, and reputation of their author. In addition, Dante’s more “conventionally” narrative works, the Vita nova and the Commedia, are both first-person narratives whose protagonist and narrator are meant to represent the author of the work: Dante himself. The present dissertation explores Dante’s self-characterization in the Vita nova and Commedia, with the aim of demonstrating how Dante employs more subtle narrative approaches to characterization as a means to overcome the impropriety of speaking of or praising oneself. The dissertation discusses both the techniques and methods used by Dante to construct his self-characterizations, as well as the resulting characters constructed.

In its analyses of the different Dante-iterations across the two texts, this dissertation employs modern narratological theories and notions of character and characterization. In the first chapter, I discuss how Dante exploits the dynamics of the first-person narrative structure, in which the present self narrates the story of the previous self, in order to add meaning and nuance to his self-characterization. The second chapter explores the narratological notion of “relation to others”, by which the comparisons drawn between multiple characters serve to characterize the Dante-iterations through differences and similarities. The third chapter considers Dante’s self-characterization in terms of depictions of belonging to or being excluded from certain communities, namely, the Dante-iterations’ inclusion in poetic communities and their activity in and exile from Florence.