Originally presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral--Universität Zürich, 1991). / Includes bibliographical references (p. [668]-680).

The purpose of this thesis has been to prepare a script based on the life and works of Dante Alighieri, with special attention to the effects of medieval culture and politics on him and his works. Chapter I includes a discussion of the reputation and poetry of Dante, as well as the purpose and procedure followed in this thesis. Chapter II describes the historical and cultural background of Medieval Europe during Dante's time. Chapter III describes Dante's life and works. Chapter IV contains the script and a production concept that offers ideas and suggestions concerning the production of the script.

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This thesis sets out a case for a mode of reading I term first-person participation in relation to Dante’s 'Commedia', a narrative poem I propose to function as an exceptionally participatory text. That Dante’s poem invites active engagement on the part of its readers is widely accepted in scholarship. My objective is to extend this debate by identifying certain of Dante’s innovations in relation to the mechanisms of narrative transmission through which such active engagement is invited. In so doing, I seek to establish that these mechanisms together constitute a narratological strategy of invitations to the reader to engage with the poem, intermittently and electively, in a mode of first-person participation, mentally simulating on her own account the journey to the desire for the divine. My research transfers and adapts for textual literary theory new notions of embodied simulation from cognitive neuroscience and emerging ideas in videogame critical theory relating to the mechanics of player presence and the function of the avatar, suggesting and evidencing parallels with the deeply personal and embodied modes of interaction with devotional texts associated with medieval practices of affective piety. I identify in the 'Commedia' a comprehensive and systematic programme of invitations to participate facilitating three types of presence in the responsive reader, and underpinning the invitation to first-person participation. Spatial presence (the perceptual illusion of ‘being there’) is invited through a multi-layered strategy I describe as narration through situated body states. Social presence (the illusion of being physically in relation with others) is invited by narration through kinaesthetic empathy. Self-presence (the experience that ‘something is happening to me’) is constituted, I suggest, through a combination of five mechanisms: a model of narrating instances that identifies the existence of four “faces” of the Dantean ‘io’; a strategy I borrow from film theory of narration through mobile camera view; a new reading of the functioning of the direct addresses to the reader; a strategy of narrative training; and a comprehensive strategy of narration through the manifold gaps in the text.

This thesis’ task is to reinterpret Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, hermeneutics, and study of metaphor from a perspective that speaks to what his early work conceptualized as a poetics of freedom. Poetics, for Ricoeur, becomes a mode of expression capable of representing and illuminating what he considers the essential paradox of our human condition: a will that is both free and bound, “set free as freedom and responsible in its very deliverance.” A poetics of freedom, Ricoeur conceptualized in the beginning of his career, would be a mediation through which we perceive a tensional reconciliation of our conflicted natures, “a linguistic register suitable for speaking of liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and totality.” Ricoeur, however, never developed the poetics of freedom beyond its original conceptualization. Through an interpretive analysis of Ricoeur's work, I reorient his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will and the existential philosophy to which it belongs. This study of Ricoeur’s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante’s Commedia. The Commedia, I argue, is a text whose poetry explicitly and implicitly discloses the importance of hermeneutics and poetics in the arrival at self-understanding. The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur’s contemporary perspective illuminate what I consider to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante’s terms, between my life and la nostra vita (our life).

This thesis’ task is to reinterpret Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of the will, hermeneutics, and study of metaphor from a perspective that speaks to what his early work conceptualized as a poetics of freedom. Poetics, for Ricoeur, becomes a mode of expression capable of representing and illuminating what he considers the essential paradox of our human condition: a will that is both free and bound, “set free as freedom and responsible in its very deliverance.” A poetics of freedom, Ricoeur conceptualized in the beginning of his career, would be a mediation through which we perceive a tensional reconciliation of our conflicted natures, “a linguistic register suitable for speaking of liberated freedom and liberated man in his existential concreteness and totality.” Ricoeur, however, never developed the poetics of freedom beyond its original conceptualization. Through an interpretive analysis of Ricoeur's work, I reorient his later works on metaphor and hermeneutics towards the concerns that dominated the philosophy of the will and the existential philosophy to which it belongs. This study of Ricoeur’s philosophy of being occurs in discourse with a poetic text, Dante’s Commedia. The Commedia, I argue, is a text whose poetry explicitly and implicitly discloses the importance of hermeneutics and poetics in the arrival at self-understanding. The correlations that arise between its aesthetic discourse and Ricoeur’s contemporary perspective illuminate what I consider to be at the core of the philosophy of being: a primordial tension of selfhood conceptualized in terms of the dialectical relations that arise between freedom and nature, between objectivity and subjectivity, and between perspective and meaning; or in Dante’s terms, between my life and la nostra vita (our life).

Diss.--Fakultät für Orientalistik und Altertumswissenschaft--Heidelberg--Ruprecht-Karl-Universität, 2002. / Bibliogr. p. 181-204. Index.

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Zugl.: Salzburg, Paris-Lodron-Univ., Diss., 2008.