The Divine Comedy is many things: a poem, a theological treatise, a political screed. Might it also be a blues? This talk explores the unexpected, electric resonances between Dante and American jazz, particularly as figured in works by Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, and Sherman Irby, who repurposed the architecture of the Commedia to critique systemic racial oppression in America and transformed Dante’s medieval vision into a startlingly modern and improvisational art form.
Speaker bio:
Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg is an Associate Professor at the University of Notre Dame, where he teaches in the Program of Liberal Studies. A scholar of modernism and the avant garde, his essays have appeared in venues such as Modernism/Modernity, Modern Language Quarterly, Textual Practice, and Critical Quarterly. He is the author of Wastepaper Modernism: Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print (Oxford, 2021), and is completing work on his second book, provisionally titled Undone: Late Modernism, Incompletion, and the Art of Failure.
Banner Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash:
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library. “Jenkins Band/Orphan Band (Harlem)” The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1934
