Dante and the Shoah

The appropriation of Dante by the Fascist regime in support of the racial laws (1938) did not diminish his popularity after WWII, when Dante’s Inferno became a template for describing the experience of the death camps. In Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Dante restores, though fleetingly, the belief in, and practice of, humanity that the Nazis are intent on crushing: far from being a medieval ancestor of the camp, the poem works as an antidote to it. The notion that Dante and humanistic culture may have been complicit, albeit unwittingly, in the Nazi genocidal scheme ignores the poet’s warnings on the misuse of intelligence. For Dante actually anticipates Horkheimer and Adorno’s discourse on the advances of thought and technology, and his story of Ulysses’ death could serve as an opening for Dialectic of Enlightenment. The chapter considers also Dante’s presence in Peter Weiss’s theatre and Giorgio Pressburger’s novels.

Post-Enlightened Poe: Analysing the Pathologies of Modernity in "The Purloined Letter" and "The Colloquy of Monos and Una"

This paper delves into the long-debated tensions that critics have found in Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)’s writings, which have placed him as a liminal figure between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In particular, I will maintain that these tensions are representative of the contradictions inherent in the modern project, which I will argue are present in Poe’s writings and which situate Poe’s texts as both a symptom of and a reaction to the pathologies of modernity. To this end, I will consider Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), arguing that the problems addressed in the volume were foreshadowed by Poe’s writings a century earlier. After a brief introduction, I will analyse the widely-discussed “The Purloined Letter” (1844) and the attitudes towards rationality that Poe presents in the story. I will then explore the lesser-known “The Colloquy of Monos and Una” (1841),2 where Poe anticipates some of the problems that Horkheimer and Adorno voiced, most notably the confusion between progress and technification.

VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN Y LA RACIONALIDAD INSTRUMENTAL = VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN AND THE INSTRUMENTAL RATIONALITY

<p>En este artículo se pretende hacer una relectura de <em>Frankenstein o el moderno Prometeo</em> (1818) desde la tesis planteada en la <em>Dialéctica de la Ilustración</em> (1944) de los filósofos Adorno y Horkheimer, intentando mostrar que Victor Frankenstein es un esclavo de la racionalidad instrumental. </p><p>This article is intended to make a rereading of Frankenstein; o, The Modern Prometheus (1818) from the thesis presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) and Eclipse of Reason (1947) of the philosophers Adorno and Horkheimer, trying to prove that Victor Frankenstein is an instrumental´s rationality slave.</p>