“You could argue that the fundamental question behind all literature is: ‘What does it mean to be human?’ Some people have even argued that storytelling itself is what makes us more than just monkeys with iPhones — that Homer created the modern consciousness, or that Shakespeare (as Harold Bloom has it) invented the human identity. In recent years, however, literature has lost a lot of ground on that score to evolutionary psychology, neurobiology and computer science, and particularly to the efforts of artificial intelligence researchers. So as we wait for the Singularity, when our iPhones will become sentient and Siri will start telling us what we can do for her, many of the savvier fiction writers have begun to come to grips with the fact that the tutelary spirit of the quest for the human may not be Dante or Emily Dickinson or Virginia Woolf, but Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped start the revolution in computing.
Turing may be best known for his version of the Victorian-era Imitation Game, in which a judge receives written responses to his questions from a man and a woman behind a screen and tries to guess from the answers which is the man and which the woman. In Turing’s version, the messages are from a human and a computer; it was his contention that when a judge couldn’t tell the difference any longer, then a machine could be said to think like a human being. The Turing test has since become, at least in the popular imagination, the holy grail of artificial intelligence developers, as well as a conceit in contemporary fiction, and that conceit is at the heart of Scott Hutchins’s clever, funny and very entertaining first novel, ‘A Working Theory of Love.'” [. . .] –James Hynes, The New York Times, November 21, 2012
Paul Auster, “Invisible” (2009)
Begins with a reference to Bertran de Born. One of the protagonists has the last name Born, and Bertran comes up a few times: both as Dante depicted him and as the poet himself. The narrator also translates one of Bertran’s poems from Occitan into English (Auster includes the whole poem).
Contributed by Elizabeth Ann Coggeshall
NY Times Review of Beha’s “What Happened to Sophie Wilder” (2012)
“. . .His first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is about many things — the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post-collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism — but at its center it’s a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.
‘When we are inspired,’ the British psychologist Adam Phillips has observed, ‘rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.’ Just ask Dante. Or Charlie Blakeman, Beha’s 28-year-old novelist narrator. When first met, Charlie is renting a room from the uncle of a college acquaintance in a town house on Washington Square. He has published a novel that almost nobody noticed and the future of his writing career looks bleak. Enter — or make that re-enter — Sophie Wilder, the wise (Sophie), wild (Wilder) love of his life, whom he first encountered almost a decade earlier in a freshman writing workshop.” [. . .] –Sarah Towers, The New York Times, June 29, 2012
Dale E. Basye, “Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go” Series
Heck: Where Bad Kids Go is a series of books that seems to have drawn heavy inspiration from Dante’s Inferno. After the first installment in the series, each subsequent book is focused on a specific “circle of Heck.” The characters’ names seem to draw inspiration from different sources of “infernal” literature – more specifically, Dante, Milton, and Goethe: Virgil, Milton, and Fauster, for example. At one point in the series, the protagonists have to cross “the great tunnel of dung-the River Styx, the final, fecal resting place of all the world’s sewage.”
Contributed by Gianluca P., 4th grade
A Review of Steven Boyett’s “Morality Bridge” (2011)
“. . . Boyett’s Hell is steeped in mysticism and antiquity, borrowing freely from the Greeks, and Dante, and Bosch. Each turn in the underworld gives Boyett a fresh excuse to unlimber new grotesque phrases, stomach-churning descriptions of tortures too horrific to contemplate (though Boyett forcefully insists upon it).
Meanwhile, Niko’s race through Hell is one of the greatest supernatural adventure stories of recent memory, surpassing Niven and Pournelle’s classic Inferno (itself a very good novel on a similar premise, even if it does turn on the power of Hell to redeem one of history’s great monsters). It is not a mere allegory about sin and redemption, cowardice and nobility: it’s also a damned good story, which sets it apart from almost all existential allegories.” [. . .] –Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing, November 8, 2011
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
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