Literature, Poetry, Disasters

Abstract

This article reflects on literature and disaster, using works by Maurice Blanchot, Italo Calvino, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. To test the link between literature and disaster, the article offers an analysis of Dante’s text, but, unlike previous readings of the Divine Comedy in relation to Covid-19, which are metaphorical or allegorical, here is a formal analysis of Dante’s verse that is proposed, in particular of Inf. iii, 1-3 and the mechanism of terza rima. Using Deleuze’s and Guattari’s De la ritournelle, the article treats Dante’s poetry and Covid-19 as two contiguous systems and shows how literature, with its rhetorical devices, is modelled on and affects our deep inner structures, which are particularly touched during traumatic events, such as natural disasters and pandemics.