ABSTRACT
This chapter utilizes the word 'queer' as developed in recent critical discourse to establish a poetic kinship between Dante's two great male protagonists, Ulysses and Brunetto Latini — both avatars in their way of a humanist rhetorical tradition, lodged at opposite ends of a history that passed from Greece to Rome to medieval France and Italy. It explores the cosmological and corporeal poetics that unite XV and XXVI while introducing two members of the family, queer cousins, Brunetto and Ulysses. The chapter focuses on the queer moral perils of humanist desire, logically enough, to Ulysses — Dante's great Greek icon of human striving and prime mover, as Homer's epic creation, of a humanist literary narrative inherited and promoted by both Brunetto and Dante. Ulysses is the instigator of a mytho-poetic narrative of time and history that began in Greece and Troy, just as Homer inaugurated the series of humanist literati that leads to Dante.
