Dante’s Dantes: Self-Characterization in the <i>V</i><i>i</i><i>ta nova</i> and <i>C</i><i>ommedia</i>

<p>Although Dante Alighieri explicitly deems the act of writing about oneself inappropriate in the <i>Convivio</i>, 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 <i>Vita nova </i>and the <i>Commedia</i>, 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 <i>Vita nova</i> and <i>Commedia</i>, 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.</p><p></p><p></p>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.<p></p>