ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the illustrated edition and the television production as examples of remediation. In Tom Phillips's illustrations to Dante's Inferno, polysemy is explored through a poststructuralist re-articulation of typology. The multimedial dimensions of Dante's Inferno in twentieth-century culture are further explored in the Channel 4 production A TV Dante. In A TV Dante the 'immediate presence' of television which brings the performance to the viewers' living room is disrupted, for visual editing emphasises the discontinuities between the narrator and the scenes. Adapting Dante's Inferno for the screen involves a self-reflective practice on the media of celebrity. The film opens on the epigraph Dante places at the opening of Canto III, signposting the entrance to Hell, read in voice-over by Gielgud. Insofar as Dante's Commedia is an art of memory, it may be read as a movement from one station to another. Phillips and Greenaway's textual practice challenges the ideal of pure form and clear text.
