(c) Bridgeman Art Library, Scholars Resource
This site explores existing notions of generativity and generative theory, drawn primarily from theories in linguistics, music and digital aesthetics, in a quest to begin to develop a theory of generativity for literary poetics.
My particular interest is in Dante’s 14th century poem, the Commedia, so I’m trying out most of my theory ideas on this text.
About me
My name is Katherine Powlesland and I’m a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, working on notions of interactivity in Dante’s Commedia. I’m exploring certain elements in digital poetics to help me look for and define analogous mechanisms in textual poetics. Specifically, I’m looking for ways that a reader can be made to feel that they are engaging directly – without any mediation by an author or narrator – with the world created by the text.
I graduated in French & Italian from Cambridge in 1991. In 2011, I returned to take the MPhil in European and Comparative Literatures and Cultures. I also have an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leeds (home of the Leeds Centre for Dante Studies) and write prose fiction.
As a side project, I’m hand-copying one of the very first printed editions of the Commedia (1472, printed by Johann Neumeister, and held by the Rare Books Room at Cambridge University Library) as an experiment in Uncreative Writing. My very slow progress – I’ve given myself the three years of my PhD, at a rate of about an hour a week – is published on a blog: klp47.wordpress.com.
logo image (c) NASA.gov, The Crab Nebula
generating dante 