Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy

Katherine Powlesland

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Italian Perspectives 53

Legenda

13 September 2022  •  186pp

ISBN: 978-1-839540-37-0 (hardback)  •  RRP £85, $115, €99

ISBN: 978-1-839540-38-7 (paperback, forthcoming)

ISBN: 978-1-839540-39-4 (JSTOR ebook)

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MedievalItalianPoetry

Since the earliest days of its circulation, Dante’s Divine Comedy has drawn readers into conversation with it, but what is it that makes the poem so particularly involving? And why might videogames help us understand this better?

Drawing on new theories in cognitive neuroscience and videogame critical theory, in this ground-breaking analysis Katherine Powlesland reveals the narrative strategies by which Dante invites the reader into an unusually cognitively participatory experience of the journey out of the dark wood and towards the encounter with the divine. By reading key narrated interactions in the poem through certain videogame mechanics of participation, Powlesland sheds new light on the poet’s ingenious deployment of textual narratological mechanisms of immersion, world creation, perspective, narrative mediation, and narrative indeterminacy. In this way, she demonstrates how Dante’s narrative innovations cue an experience of embodied immersion – so-called ‘presence’ – at the virtual encounters of the poem, blurring cognitive boundaries between the virtual and the real, and irresistibly drawing the responsive reader into repeated participation in those conversations.

Katherine Powlesland gained her PhD at the University of Cambridge in 2018.

Reviews:

  • ‘Drawing inspiration from second-wave cognitivist theories and particularly from embodied cognition, Powlesland proposes a new and fresh way to analyse the Comedy as a participatory text. The scholar achieves this by innovatively borrowing concepts and views from video games studies and adapting them to literary criticism... a strong contribution to Dante Studies, achieved through an innovative and unexpected perspective that bridges the gap between literary studies and videoludic criticism. As such, it is a cutting-edge text both in method and in content.’ — Mattia Bellini, Italian Studies 79.1, 2024, 100-01 (full text online)
  • ‘Powlesland’s study offers an original approach to some of the most well-worn threads of investigation in Dante criticism. Revisiting the last century of Anglophone criticism’s most essential narratological puzzles, Powlesland presents a fresh perspective, one that reinvests the body with its critical role in reading, and that draws on current research in cognitive science and video game theory to complement rigorous analysis of the poem’s narrative structure.’ — Elizabeth Coggeshall, Italica 100.3, 2023, 458-60 (full text online)
  • ‘A most engaging study on reading experiences of the Commedia and, while proposing the model of ‘first-person participation’ as a general one for any printed text, it also sheds (new) light on many Dantean narratological devices that expand scholarship through detailed and convincing arguments.’ — Dario Galassini, Bibliotheca Dantesca 6, 2023, 334-36
  • ‘Medieval affective literature and modern technologies of virtual experience are conjoined in a reciprocal loop. This is without doubt a powerful pedagogy for students who may be better versed in interactive computer games than in the epistemologies of the Christian Middle Ages; indeed, it may usher them towards an authentic appreciation of the latter, just as the bookish medievalist could as well be persuaded into the opposite direction.’ — Peerawat Chiaranunt, Modern Language Review 119.3, July 2024, 367-79 (full text online)

For a contents listing, see this volume at JSTOR.

Bibliography entry:

Powlesland, Katherine, Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy, Italian Perspectives, 53 (Legenda, 2022)

First footnote reference: 35 Katherine Powlesland, Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy, Italian Perspectives, 53 (Legenda, 2022), p. 21.

Subsequent footnote reference: 37 Powlesland, p. 47.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

Bibliography entry:

Powlesland, Katherine. 2022. Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy, Italian Perspectives, 53 (Legenda)

Example citation: ‘A quotation occurring on page 21 of this work’ (Powlesland 2022: 21).

Example footnote reference: 35 Powlesland 2022: 21.

(To see how these citations were worked out, follow this link.)

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