Language as chaos: Dante's 'Inferno' in the twentieth-century novel (Italy, Elio Vittorini, Ralph Ellison, Claude Simon, Albert Camus, France, Algeria).

摘要

This study focuses on Dante's use of language in the Inferno and how such use bears out in twentieth-century novels, in particular during the period immediately preceding and following World War II. Dante's Inferno at times serves as a reference point for novelists to describe such disruptive elements as world war, political corruption and society's chaos. Dante was concerned with finding new ways of confronting his despair over the state of society and the consequences of its larger transgressions.; The Inferno's means for pointing out some of the most egregious offenses turn on the abuse of language. Dante, as poet, had to mold a language that would express creation's rebellion against God while employing a language that reflected that same corruption. In Elio Vittorini's Conversazione in Sicilia, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Claude Simon's La Route des Flandres, and concluding with Albert Camus's La Chute, we see how Dante's revelation of language as a reflection of inherent corruption or degradation serves the twentieth-century novel's depiction of its own world. The language employed by each of the twentieth-century authors of this study is structured within a corrupt setting similar to Dante's Inferno. Thus, by evoking Dante's Inferno, the twentieth-century novelist creates a transgressive literary context to which the protagonist must bear witness, concede, and, in some cases, even embrace.; The Inferno serves as a model for twentieth-century novelists seeking to structure conditions parallel to the general breakdown in the late Trecento. In both the medieval masterpiece and the selected twentieth-century novels, language's transgressive mode creates the master-metaphor: the journey, through which the protagonist experiences the best and worst of himself and humankind.; The selected novels, borne out of the disillusion, disruption, and chaos typical of twentieth-century protagonists' narrative experiences, reflect the disruption and chaos in Dante's description of the "perduta gente." Ultimately engrained in each work's language is a fundamental sense of a loss of order.; Each protagonist experiences a crisis of perceived moral, societal, or political values expressed through differing transgressive transformations of language. The results of the crisis are seen in the narratives' (the Inferno is a narrative as well) representation of chaos.