Italian Literature Commons^™

Everyone’S Their Own Worst Critic Or How I Learned Not To Fear The End, Audrey Belle Rosenblith

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Jean Genet, author ofThe Balcony, and Dante Alighieri, author of Inferno, have more in common than you might think. For one thing, they were both obsessed with death.

The Vestibule (a devised theater piece) was made to examine this obsession with (and fear of) death further.

Art is a tool we can use to confront our fear of death. All people fear death.

The Gulag Archipelago: From Inferno To Paradiso, David Matual

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

It is apparent from the title of his novel The First Circle and from various details there and in other works that Alexander Solzhenitsyn is familiar with at least the imagery of Dante's Divine Comedy. One direct and several indirect references to it also suggest a Dantean subtext in his longest and most ambitious project, The Gulag Archipelago. Indeed, the loci of the Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—are transformed in the Gulag into metaphorical representations of the various stages in the development of man's consciousness—and especially Solzhenitsyn's consciousness—during the ordeals of arrest, inquest, imprisonment, …