Dante, American-Style: Seymour Chwast’s Graphic Adaptations of the Divine Comedy and European Literature

Abstract

In 2010, the American graphic designer Seymour Chwast (New York, °1931) published Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Graphic Adaptation, which condenses Dante’s masterpiece into 127 pages. Previous scholarship has mainly focused on how Chwast adapts the Comedy and the specific passages he chooses to include. Chwast has been viewed as just one of many interpreters within a long tradition of Dante adaptations. However, we argue that Chwast possibly introduces a new chapter in this tradition. Specifically, he diverges from two types of Dante illustrators. Firstly, he surpasses illustrators who subordinate their work to Dante’s literary text and who simply depict images and characters from the book to visually represent and explain the text. Secondly, he deviates from artists who engage with Dante as equals, creating a work of art with double authorship, e.g., Gustave Doré. Chwast moves beyond Dante and engages primarily with American pop culture, particularly its cinematic tradition and comic books, rather than with Dante. The same process can be observed in Chwast’s other literary adaptations. Hence, in this paper, we mainly focus on Chwast’s adaptation of the Divine Comedy within the artist’s broader Americanisation of European literature. The key aspect of this process is Chwast’s cultural appropriation, wherein the literary sources disappear to make room for 20th-century American pop culture. As a result, the significance of the relation with the sources diminishes in comparison to Chwast’s main goal of representing European literature from his own American viewpoint and appealing to an American readership.