기원의 소용돌이 : <신곡>의 말과 문자

Abstract

This paper starts by paying attention to the fact that Dante’s Divine Comedy was in reality formed in the circumstances of orality which had been maintained until the advent of the so-called press culture in the mid-fifteenth century in Europe. It seems that this point, however, has not been highlighted properly and actively among the Dante scholars who have hitherto approached Dante’s world merely in the way of letter-centered thoughts and methodology under what McLuhan calls Gutenberg Galaxy. We might need to re-explore the time of Dante when the literature was circulated in the form of orality rather than literacy; that is, we need to strive to understand in what way Dante tried to communicate with people who read his writings. Undoubtedly Dante’s literary writings were produced with letters, but, nevertheless, they were deeply influenced by orality and transcription as the main means of communication at the time of Dante. More precisely, we can say that Dante was able to combine orality and literacy in his literature very successfully, and the Divine Comedy can be regarded as the result of that combination. This may be the reason why we call Dante a poet of transition from medieval to modern, from orality to script, which allows us to understand this approach not to be trapped in both what Derrida calls logos-centrism and what one may call script-centrism. In this respect, we need to pay more attention to hear Dante’s speech through his writings, imagining their existence oscillating between logos and script. In all, this study can hopefully contribute to propel another approach to Dante’s literature in the way of diluting its origin, rather than maintaining it as a pre-fixed one.