Abstract

One of my main concerns in this dissertation is the issue of truth and interpretation in Dante's Commedia, for the Commedia is a text about textuality and interpretation, and thus a text that directly addresses the question of its own relation to its future readers and interpreters. This dissertation shows why the truth of the Commedia is not just limited to the historical truth of the events described in the text, but also reveals a truth about reading and hermeneutics as well. ;My own approach to the issue of truth and interpretation is somewhat different from that generally accepted by the proponents of modern philosophy, and by many Dante scholars. ;Chapters One through Three of the dissertation show that, for Dante, the truth of an interpretation depends primordially on the mediation of the past through the present, and that such mediation entails a non-instrumental view of language and a non-historicist account of the past. Chapter Four shows that, for Dante, the ultimate condition of this mediation of the past through the present is a concern for the future, i.e., a concern for one's own freedom and salvation. With this, Dante is himself appropriating the classical and Christian traditions' rich notion of recapitulation, understood as forward motion towards a future end that is also a beginning that appropriates the past anew, while also foreshadowing Heidegger's later notion of authentic repetition. Given this notion of futurality, it is possible to see that Dante's instructions to the reader about how to interpret his own text, the Commedia, simultaneously constitute an invitation to the reader to embrace his own freedom and salvation by writing his own narrative of his life's journey