This talk will introduce Dante’s Divine Comedy as a particularly elaborate act of world creation that seeks to immerse its readers into a world that is not our own, from the depths of hell to a realm beyond all known limits. It is a form of virtual reality that was attempted long before Meta. What is it about this afterlife system that has remained so compelling more than seven centuries after it was first written? What does this poem ask of us and of itself in dwelling on the worst and best of us? Dante drew on many precedents in crafting his afterlife vision; he also took advantage of what was left undefined. We will examine the poetic tools that he used to make a brand new world out of the beyond, one that has had immense influence on Italian writers such as Boccaccio and on world creators across time and space.
Akash Kumar is Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on medieval Italian literature through the lens of Mediterranean and global culture, from the history of science to the origins of popular phenomena such as the game of chess. Recent work on a global Dante has appeared in the volume Migrants Shaping Europe, Past and Present (Manchester UP, 2022), MLN (2022), and the Blackwell Companion to World Literature (2020). Akash also serves as Editor of Dante Notes, the digital publication of the Dante Society of America.