Dantologies: Theoretical and Theological Turns in Dante Studies

About William Franke

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities a Dante scholar and a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has also been professor of philosophy at the University of Macao (201316) Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg (200506) and Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow at Potsdam University (199495). In 2021 he became Honorary Professor (Professor Honoris Causa) of the Agora Hermeneutica. Frankes apophatic philosophy is conceived and expounded in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society ranging from identity politics to cognitive science and media studies in On the Universality of What Is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). As a philosopher of the humanities with a negative theological vision Franke elaborates a theological poetics in books including Dantes Interpretive Journey (1996) Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (2009) Dante and the Sense of Transgression: The Transgression of the Sign (2012). He traces the ramifications of Dantes theological poetics forward in modern poetry (Secular Scriptures: Theological Poetics and the Challenge of Modernity 2016) and backward toward Dantes own sources (The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante 2015). His book Dantes Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection (2021) received the Hermes Award: Book of the Year in Phenomenological Hermeneutics from The International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH). It is cited along with Frankes two other speculative monographs revolving around Dante published in the same year: The Divine Vision of Dantes Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation (2021) and Dantes Vita Nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation (2021).