Dante’s Modernity, Our Modernity
Srikanth Reddy’s Underworld Lit—a TLS Book of the Year for 2020 and a finalist for the Four Quartets Prize and Griffin International Poetry Prize—takes the shape of a modern Commedia, with short “cantos” divided into the three academic terms (plus one summer quarter) from Reddy’s own academic calendar at the University of Chicago. In the collection, the professor-protagonist finds himself descending into a “multiverse” academic underworld, setting off from an “inky, dismal, and unprofitable […] recent leave of absence from my life.”
Poster from Srikanth Reddy’s performance at the International Poetry Forum, April 15, 2025 (credit: International Poetry Forum)
This collection is not an attempt to “modernize” Dante, whatever that might entail. But, contextualized within the protagonist’s semi-autobiographical struggles with the tenure process and a cancer diagnosis, Reddy’s journey through the afterlife implicitly takes on a deeper question: what makes our modern life—and, by extension, our modern afterlife—different from Dante’s? Are the dead closer to us, or farther away?
The publisher (Wave Books) describes this book as an “adventurous serial prose poem” that
moves from the college classroom to the oncologist's office to the mythic underworlds of Mayan civilization, the ancient Egyptian place of judgment and rebirth, the infernal court of Qing dynasty China, and beyond—testing readers along with the way with diabolically demanding quizzes. It unsettles our sense of home as it ferries us back and forth across cultures, languages, epochs, and the shifting border between the living and the dead.
The Genealogies of Modernity project has long been interested in Dante and conceptions of modernity and the afterlife. If this confluence of subjects interests you, be sure to check out this video of Reddy’s recent performance at the Pittsburgh-based International Poetry Forum. For further reading on the subject—to learn how Dante’s modernity differs from or mirrors our own—see this list of some Dante-inspired articles from the Genealogies of Modernity journal:
The Geopolitics of Nostalgia: Dante and Xi Jinping