Dante Alighieri and autofiction: the hero poet in the Commedia

Abstract: When Serge Doubrovski employed the term autofiction in an exercise

in response to Philippe Lejeune, he established that autofiction refers to the fact
of talking about yourself, be it a memory or not, as a fictional being. The term,
currently present in the Larousse and Robert dictionaries, is widely used to
describe several contemporary works. However, Vincent Colonna, in his
doctorate thesis, created a new acception for the term created by Doubrovski.
According to Colonna, autofiction is a projection of the author in an imaginary
situation, creating four types of autofiction: fantastic, biographic, speculative,
and intrusive. In the fantastic, he considers the work of il sommo poeta, Dante
Alighieri, Commedia, once the florentine writer uses himself as a hero to walk
through the realms beyond death, transforming his existence and his identity in
a surreal story. Dante, a poet, remembering his trip to the three worlds beyond,
created Dante, character and poet, synthesis of the medieval man, but also a
precursor of the modern man. Thus, we intend to treat the florentine poet's
magnum opus not as fantastic autofiction, as Colonna put it, but only as
autofiction, the first in the perspective of bringing the writer as the protagonist of
their own work, exploring correlate matters of his time and pointing to other
common themes in contemporaneity, such as metafiction and the work of the
writer. To perform this analysis, we shall utilize the theoretical framework of
Diana Klinger, Vicent Colonna, Philippe Gasparini, when it comes to autofiction;
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht for a comprehension of the movement in
contemporaneity, as well as other theoreticians, and also works relating to the
study of hermeneutics, in the search for symbolic understanding of the figure of
the author, and authorial.

Keywords: Dante Alighieri. Commedia. Autofiction.