The Return to Philology and the Future of Literary Criticism: Reading the Temporality of Literature in Auerbach, Benjamin, and Dante

Martin Eisner is Chair of Romance Studies and Professor of Italian at Duke University.

His first three books show how an attention to the materiality of texts can transform our understandings of literary history, whether on the scale of the single manuscript, the single work, or the individual biography. He shows Boccaccio’s crucial role in the construction of the Italian literary tradition by scrutinizing one remarkable manuscript in Boccaccio and the Invention of Italian Literature: Dante, Petrarch, Cavalcanti, and the Authority of the Vernacular (Cambridge UP, 2013), which was published in Italian as Boccaccio e l'invenzione della letteratura italiana (Salerno, 2022). He demonstrates how investigating the transformations of Dante Vita nuova across multiple material forms, from medieval manuscripts to modern movies, can yield new interpretations in Dante's New Life of the Book: A Philology of World Literature (Oxford UP, 2021), which won the Howard R. Marraro Prize from the Modern Language Association. In Boccaccio, the Disguised Revolutionary, which is forthcoming in Reaktion Books's Renaissance Lives series, he brings into focus Boccaccio's innovative thinking about desire, language, gender, cultural diversity, and power through the lens of the manuscripts Boccaccio used and wrote.

His next project, provisionally entitled "Dante's Moon: The Curious History of a Cosmic Question”, proposes a new model of intellectual history that highlights how the reception of Dante’s Paradise produced new discursive spaces of poetry, politics, physics, protest, philology, and pedagogy in the works of Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Galileo, Angela Tarabotti, Vico, and Maria Montessori, respectively. His research has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, the American Academy in Rome, the American Philosophical Association, and the Fulbright Foundation.