Prof. Angela Alaimo O'Donnell
Fordham University
The Drama of Dante :
Dear Dante & Poetic Performance
ABSTRACT: The dramatic nature of Dante’s Commedia has long been recognized by readers, scholars, and artists. To read Inferno is to witness a series of Dramatis Personae step forward to tell their stories, from Virgil to Francesca to Odysseus to Ugolino, and the many characters in between. Similarly in Purgatorio, we hear from those suffering souls who make the arduous journey up the seven storey mountain in the hope of achieving heaven. Finally, in Paradiso we hear the most fantastical stories of all told by the souls in bliss as Dante listens and learns about the joys eternity holds. All of these monologues and dialogues are situated within a poem that is titled Commedia, a term Dante borrows from the genre of drama to indicate that his epic poem is also a grand play in which we see the great Christian comedy of the fall, redemption, and salvation enacted. Many playwrights and poets, from the 17th-century to the present, have created plays and dramatic performances that bring Dante’s drama to life, allowing audiences to hear Dante’s words, instead of just reading them, conveying the power of Dante’s language and the spell that is cast by his ingenious and powerful terza rima.
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For the Wednesday evening 'Special Session'
The Drama of Flannery O’Connor: From the Page to the Stage
ABSTRACT: Flannery O’Connor is an inherently dramatic writer. Her stories present vivid characters and bring them into conflict with one another, conflict that is often shocking, violent, and terribly consequential, physically and spiritually, as these deeply imperfect people work out their salvation in fear and trembling. When Thomas Merton eulogized O’Connor, he compared her to Sophocles, not to a great fiction writer but to a great dramatist, recognizing the ways in which her stories present events that inspire pity and fear in the reader as we see ourselves, our flaws and our foibles, in her characters, and our own potential fates in the fates that befall them. This presentation will examine the ways in which Karin Coonrod’s stage presentations of O’Connor’s stories enflesh O’Connor’s words and bring that drama to life, engaging the viewer in an incarnational experience of the stories as they are translated from the page onto the stage.
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Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, scholar, and writer at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include eleven collections of poems, a memoir, a book of hours inspired by Flannery O’Connor’s prayer practice, a critical biography of O’Connor, and a book on O’Connor and race. O’Donnell serves as founding editor of the series “Studies in the Catholic Imagination” published by Fordham Press.