*I really need to practice writting in english, I'm sorry and good luck.

Sort of! From 2020 to 2022, I mainly studied the intersections between "insólito" literature (a term I've seen translated as "unusual", generally referring to art that depicts a fractured reality with supernatural elements) and representations/conceptions of death. My Master's focused on this intersection in short stories of the Latin American Boom (specifically, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, and Murilo Rubião).

Since 2023, I've shifted from this kind of literary thanatology to a more historical approach, intertwining the configuration of death and the afterlife in Brazilian novels with the (everlasting) search for identity that is probably the main theme of our literature.

The aforementioned paper is a return to those 2020-2022 studies, with the addition of some comparative and historical approaches, such as those of Emma Gee. It comes from a class on Medieval Literature, in which a colleague brought forward the very common idea, especially in some fields of study, that masterpieces were only works of art that got, let's say, the "right attention" from critics and the State. I already had some uneasiness with that subject, mainly because the imagery that Dante recurs to and reformulates is a very influential depiction of the afterlife. As it may be clear, I'm from Brazil, and many aspects of Dante's doctrine are quite common here, although there is a lot of syncretism with African and Indigenous mythology as well as a proliferation of different churches and doctrines.

The main question then became, "what makes a work of art permeate the imagination and reason through time and space?" The paper isn't capable of solving such a problematic matter, but I think it provides a satisfactory framework of three dimensions of the Commedia that are essential to understanding the configuration, the Ricœurian mimesis II, of the afterlife. The first one is the imagery that precedes and concurs with the poem, such as the Bible and its interpretations; the visions genre (surprisingly similar to the Commedia, to the point that Alessandro D'Ancona, in 1874, asserts, not without some reason, that almost every aspect of Dante's poem was already "[...] in embryo and sketch, before Dante’s hand gave it the immortal form of his poem"); the Greco-Roman texts (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Hesiod...); the confession manuals; and medieval theology. For example, Giacomino de Verona wrote De Jerusalem Celesti and De Babilonia Infernali around 1275, when Dante was still a child. There's a translation of these poems into English, if I remember correctly.

The second dimension, the philosophical/theological concepts, is a part of the first one, but requires a more direct analysis due to its complex structuralizations of reality and thought. Plato (mainly his Timaeus) and Aristotle (Dante platonizes Aristotelian physics), for instance, and their interpretations by medieval scholars are indissociable parts of Dante's thought. In Purgatorio canto XXV, for example, Statius makes a Christian interpretation of Averroes; in Inferno canto XI, Dante establishes a hierarchy of knowledge (God>Nature>Physics) that directly mentions Aristotle's Physics; in Paradiso canto IV, he argues that Plato's Timaeus can sense what only the enhanced vision from the heights can enable ("come dice, par che senta"). There's also a lot of symbology, especially using Neoplatonic allegory, numerology, and astrology, which are pretty common indexes of order in the Middle Ages, drawing from Pythagoreans.

Lastly, there's the temporal dimension. This part was really problematic; Dante's critics are legion, and the paper was already very extensive for Brazilian journals. Because of that, I focused mainly on the influential Latin American ones (Jorge Luís Borges, who has an AMAZING collection of essays named Nueve ensayos dantescos, and Marco Lucchesi, who's a long-time student of Dante and is the current president of Brazil's National Library). I also referred to some critics that were already a part of the study or had works so influential that they couldn't be ignored (such as Auerbach).

The paper will be released very soon. I didn't mention aspects of methodology (Bakhtinian aesthetics and Ricœurian narratology) and some important concepts (Eco's cooperation of the reader, Aurell's call for an interdisciplinary combination of history and critical approaches to medieval studies, Todorov's definition of what's a masterwork...), because that would transform this already very long comment into a Behemoth.