Dante's Persons explores the concept of personhood as it appears in
Dante's Commedia and seeks out the constituent ethical modes that the
poem presents as necessary for attaining a fullness of persona. The
study suggests that Dante presents a vision of 'transhuman'
potentiality in which the human person is, after death, fully
integrated into co-presence with other individuals in a network of
relations based on mutual recognition and interpersonal attention. The
Commedia, Heather Webb argues, aims to depict and to actively
construct a transmortal community in which the plenitude of each
individual's person is realized in and through recognition of the
personhood of other individuals who constitute that community, whether
living or dead. Webb focuses on the strategies the Commedia employs to
call us to collaborate in the mutual construction of persons. As we
engage with the dead that inhabit its pages, we continue to maintain
the personhood of those dead. Webb investigates Dante's implicit and
explicit appeals to his readers to act in relation to the characters
in his otherworlds as if they were persons. Moving through the various
encounters of Purgatorio and Paradiso, this study documents the ways
in which characters are presented as persone in development or in a
state of plenitude through attention to the 'corporeal' modes of
smiles, gazes, gestures, and postures. Dante's journey provides a
model for the formation and maintenance of a network of personal
attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not
superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.
Les mer
An Ethics of the Transhuman
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191081873
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter