ABSTRACT
Dante writes 'in pro del mondo che mal vive' [to serve the world that lives so ill]. 1 The world in which we ourselves live self-evidently does live amiss. Yet few readers of literature are these days inclined to turn the page in search of remedies. Still fewer academics are inclined to do so. We all have our excuses, of course, even if some of them amount to professional deformation. Under the shadow of the Research Assessment Exercise or constrained by the demands of the tenure-track, 'pro' or 'advantage' is likely to be calculated in terms very different from those of ethical remedy or moral urgency. It is true that in certain areas of theoretical inquiry — notably those opened up by philosophers such as Levinas and Martha Nussbaum — ethics and the connections between ethics and literature have been the subject of extended discussion. But Dante has rarely entered into these considerations. Nor has the discussion often concerned itself with matters of directly ethical practice. It is, after all, rather impolite 'to scratch an itch' too obviously. Even worse — to any elegantly sceptical or liberally deconstructive conscience — is the realization that, for Dante, goodness is the supreme object of our desires, supremely more interesting than evil and supremely the target and goal of his best poetic efforts.
