Intratestualità e digitale: prospettive esegetiche sulla ‘nuova’ filologia dantesca

Abstract

The external architecture of the Comedy reproduces a signal of its internal geometry, made up of textual references that the ancient exegetes could only guess and sometimes detect, on the basis of a good memory (visual and musical) and a marked synaptic-linguistic sensitivity.

The digitization of manuscript texts and the increase of databases and literary applications (The Dartmouth Dante Project and Dante Lab are just a few examples) have literally oriented the 'new' exegetical disposition towards Dante’s text. The possibility of simultaneously carrying out textual searches within the poem has made intratextuality an almost essential element of modern lecturae, increasingly oriented towards the search for a unitary and organic interpretation of the songs of the Comedy that communicate their more exact meaning in relationships which they entertain with the whole of Dante's writing, sometimes going beyond the boundaries of the poem itself. We cannot consider it accidental that the rampant intratextual attitude of Dante's critics - which we place chronologically at the end of the 90s and the beginning of the new millennium - coincided with the flowering of digital humanities and represents the essential consequence of the modern exegetical approach. to Dante's text.