Dantologies: Theoretical and Theological Turns in Dante Studies

The comparison of current theoretical approaches to Dante, particularly those mobilizing the resources of theology, serves to adumbrate and illustrate, by application to Dante studies as a specific field of scholarship, the author’s own philosophy of culture and the humanities

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities, a Dante scholar, and a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has also been professor of philosophy at the University of Macao (2013-16), Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg (2005-06), and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at Potsdam University (1994-95). In 2021, he became Honorary Professor (Professor Honoris Causa) of the Agora Hermeneutica. Franke’s apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society ranging from identity politics to cognitive science and media studies in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). As a philosopher of the humanities with a negative theological vision, Franke elaborates a theological poetics in books including Dante’s Interpretive Journey (1996), Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression: ＂The Transgression of the Sign＂ (2012). He traces the ramifications of Dante’s theological poetics forward in modern poetry (Secular Scriptures: Theological Poetics and the Challenge of Modernity, 2016) and backward toward Dante’s own sources (The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante, 2015). His book Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection (2021) received the Hermes Award: Book of the Year in Phenomenological Hermeneutics from The International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH). It is cited along with Franke’s two other speculative monographs revolving around Dante published in the same year: The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation (2021) and Dante’s Vita Nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation (2021).