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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy

Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy

Powlesland, Katherine

Paperback

Series: Italian Perspectives, Book 53

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1839540389
ISBN13: 9781839540387
Publisher: Legenda
Published: Jun 16 2025
Pages: 186
Weight: 0.67
Height: 0.40 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English

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.

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