Dante's Poetics of Exile (Critical Essay‪)‬

Focusing on Dante's oeuvre, for Guy P. Raffa, in his "Dante's Exile of Poetics," Dante's exile, figuring as both misfortune and opportunity, is arguably the most personal manifestation of the poet's dialectical imagination. This experience and conception of exile thus becomes the catalyst for Dante's dialectical hermeneutics ("both--and" instead of "either/or") and what most distinguishes the poet's hermeneutics from the Pauline-Augustinian model of conversion. To develop this argument? and to sharpen the distinction between "conversion" and "exile"--Raffa draws on Jakobson's distinction between metaphoric substitution, whereby the old life is eradicated for the new one; on metonymic contiguity, which keeps both past and present in play; and also on historical and theological representations of exile in the medieval imagination. "We will not complain of Dante's miseries: had all gone right with him as he wished it, he might have been Prior, Podesta, or whatsoever they call it, of Florence, well accepted among neighbours,--and the world had wanted one of the most notable words ever spoken or sung. Florence would have had another prosperous Lord Mayor; and the ten dumb centuries continued voiceless, and the ten other listening centuries (for there will be ten of them and more) had no Divina Commedia to hear!"