AWARD WINNER: Hermes Award, 2003: Book of the Year in Phenomenological Hermeneutics, Agora Hermeneutica, The International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH), 2021

Publisher’s Website: The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso

“This is a brilliant and enjoyable book. With sharp interdisciplinary acumen, Franke provides lucid and creative readings that offer original and fruitful perspectives on Dante’s Commedia, highlighting its relevance for contemporary studies in theology, philosophy and literature. The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso compellingly shows how Dante’s bold and experimental writing can, even for us today, vivify in striking ways reflection on truth and its mediation.”

–Vittorio Montemaggi, King’s College London

‘This book possesses the outstanding qualities one has come to expect from Franke’s scholarship: broad and deep mastery of the Western philosophical and theological traditions; attentive, nuanced, and fecund literary analysis; a crystal-clear, jargon-free, economical, elegant, and at times lyrical prose; a searching and intelligent devotion to groundbreaking inquiry. In Franke’s view, Dante’s longed-for vision of God is nothing other than his vision of Letters – of Writing that, in keeping with the doctrine of Incarnation, both is and is not God. Such Writing is not human but is revelation: it shows God visibly, yet at the same time it is not God’s essence as the Absolute and the Infinite.’

Gregory B. Stone – Louisiana State University

‘Franke seeks to interpret Dante’s vision of writing in ways that make it available to philosophical analysis and speculative contemplation, methods aesthetic and spiritual at the same time. Such connections offer important resources for philosophical and theological reflections that resonate ‘in the excruciating dilemmas of [the] present cultural predicament’ … Highly recommended.’

–D. Pesta Source: Choice Connect

“As a means through which to engage with Dante (vis-a-vis Hegel, Derrida, Wittgenstein, etc.), The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso, certainly offers a new reading of the Commedia, a thorough depiction of the Heaven of Jove, and provides forays into looking at the more mystical and esoteric aspects of Dante’s magnum opus. In addition, Franke provides for an English-reading audience several German sources and commentaries of Dante that aren’t typically featured. That aside, it does at times seem that the density of language, and the appeal to philosophical terms which are not always explained, obfuscates rather than elucidates what is otherwise a novel and incredibly interesting reading of a very specific moment in Dante’s Commedia. Still, I would highly recommend this work to those readers interested in examining Dante through the lens of philosophy and literary theory, as well as for those scholars interested in Dante’s connection to mysticism.”
— SEAN WIDLAKE, Rutgers University, The Italian Quarterly, XV (2023): 253-56 (Summer-Fall nos. 237-38)

Sean Widlake review

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