Reading circles, poetic communities: Dante at Berkeley 1946–1950
Event details
Between 1946 and 1950, poets Robin Blaser, Robert Duncan, and Jack Spicer attended Ernst Kantorowicz’s lectures at the University of California Berkeley. By examining unpublished material collected at the Bancroft Library Archive, this paper discusses the ways in which the three poets had access to, read, and appropriated Dante’s text, with references to other authors of the Italian literary tradition, including Petrarch. The analysis will shed light on Dante’s relevance to the three poets’ definition of the poetic coterie known as the Berkeley Renaissance, while discussing examples of Blaser’s, Duncan’s, and Spicer’s reuses of Dante. While considering these reuses in comparison with the modernists’ practices of metamorphosing Dante, the analysis will make use of Stanley Fish’s theory of the ‘interpretive community’ (1980) to investigate the poets’ practice of reading Dante as a means to establish a poetic community deeply historically, geographically, culturally, and gender situated.
Dr Valentina Mele (University of Leeds)
Valentina Mele is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Leeds, where she is currently working on the reception of Dante and the Duecento poetry and culture in the poets of the Berkeley Renaissance. She was previously IRC Postdoctoral Fellow at UCC. She completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge (2020), after obtaining a Mst at the University of Oxford and a BA and MA at the Università degli Studi di Padova. She is the co-Director of the Centre for Dante Studies in Ireland and Associate Director of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies.