Dante's Persons

An Ethics of the Transhuman

Heather Webb

A fascinating study of ethical thought in Dante Alighieri's Commedia
Comprehensively explores Dante's concept of persona
Provides a new perspective on a much-studied work

Dante's Persons

An Ethics of the Transhuman

Heather Webb

Description

Persona: Dante's Ethics of the Transhuman 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formation and maintenance of a network of personal attachments, attachments that, as constitutive of persona, are not superseded even in the presence of the direct vision of God.

Dante's Persons

An Ethics of the Transhuman

Heather Webb

Dante's Persons

An Ethics of the Transhuman

Heather Webb

Author Information

Heather Webb received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2004. She taught at The Ohio State University from 2004 to 2012 as an Assistant Professor and an Associate Professor. She has been a University Lecturer at the University of Cambridge since 2012 and a Fellow of Selwyn College since 2013. She is the author of The Medieval Heart and co-editor, with George Corbett, of Vertical Readings in Dante's Comedy.

Dante's Persons

An Ethics of the Transhuman

Heather Webb

Reviews and Awards

"Webb is right, I think, to contend that Dante also presents what he might have called the anagogic vision of blessedness and that he anchors that vision in the face that knows itself in the love of God that it sees and shares with others...after all, there is no consequence, only simultaneity. In the end, Webb's claim that the substance of personhood is ethical seems to me a canny way to recast the function of the intellect, which is the faculty that oversees one's relation to oneself, and the will, which is the faculty that oversees one's relations with others...they are one, joined by an act that corresponds to the ardent regarding that joins the blessed in heaven, itself a reflection of the Holy Spirit, which, breathing love between them, joins the Father and the Son. For this, as for many other reasons, Dante's Persons is a valuable, mind-expanding contribution to our understanding of human and divine relations in the Comedy." --Warren Ginsberg, The Medieval Review

"Focusing on Purgatorio as the primary place in Dante's Commedia where it is possible for persona to develop-the static nature of Inferno, of necessity, affording no meaningful possibility for change or development-Webb examines how characters are presented as personae in process and how the reader is called to engage those characters. Turning in conclusion to Paradiso, Webb argues "that a number of long-standing critical habitual vocabularies and paradigms that stress overcoming or surpassing individual relationships in Dante's trajectory...are ultimately limiting if we seek to understand this new conjoined vision that Paradiso celebrates." Offering insightful and fresh readings of two pairs of characters-Franscesca and Paolo in Inferno and Statius and Virgil in Purgatorio-Dante's Persons is provocative, erudite, and best suited to advanced scholars." --D. Pesta, Choice