Abstract

The following treatise starts off with one of the most famous passages of occidental literature, the beginning of Dante Alighieri′s,Divine Comedy'. Dante models his protagonist′s straying in the selva oscura on the courtly novel, but as one would expect, he does not confine himself to that. Dante′s wood is a complex metaphor for man′s path of life. But not least, it also functions as a hermeneutic metaphor for the apories of reading and for the difficulties of an exegesis, which must leave its text a part of its obscurity.