Pasolini after Dante

What role did Dante play in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)? His unfinished and fragmented imitation of the Comedia, La Divina Mimesis, is only one outward sign of what was a sustained dialogue with Dante on representation begun in the early 1950s. During this period, the philologists Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990) and Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) played a crucial role in Pasolini{u2019}s re-thinking of {u2018}represented reality{u2019}, suggesting Dante as the best literary, authorial and political model for a generation of postwar Italian writers. This emerged first as {u2018}Dantean realism{u2019} in Pasolini{u2019}s prose and poetry, after Contini{u2019}s interpretation of Dante and of his plurilingualism, and then as {u2018}figural realism{u2019} in his cinema, after Auerbach{u2019}s concepts of Dante{u2019}s figura and {u2018}mingling of styles{u2019}. Following the evolution of Pasolini{u2019}s mimetic ideal from these formative influences through to La Divina Mimesis, Emanuela Patti explores Pasolini{u2019}s politics of representation in relation to the {u2018}national-popular{u2019}, the {u2018}questione della lingua{u2019} and the Italian post-war debates on neorealism, while also providing a new interpretation of some of his major literary and cinematic works.