Aesthetic Experience and Ideas: Death in Literature - Dante's Inferno and Descent Narratives

Vocabulary flashcards covering literary afterlives, descent narratives, and specific characters and motifs from Dante Alighieri's Inferno as discussed in the lecture.

Literary Afterlife

A genre in which a place and time after death are imagined and peopled with dead characters, assuming that eternal life is available in a realm beyond present reality.

Intertextuality

Allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts within a literary work.

Katabasis

An ancient Greek term literally meaning "a going down," referring to a story about a living person who visits the land of the dead and returns physically unscathed but psychologically changed.

Katabatic Imagination

A narrative construct describing an infernal journey and a subsequent return.

Dante Alighieri

An Italian poet and scholar born in 1265, best known for writing The Divine Comedy, which is considered one of the greatest poems in world literature.

Terza Rima

The rhyme scheme used in The Divine Comedy, following a pattern such as ABA, BCB, etc.

Allegory in Inferno

At its basic level, a representation of the fall of humankind and the pursuit of redemption.

Charon

The bad-tempered ferryman with eyes of fire responsible for rowing the souls of the dead across the River Styx and River Acheron.

Minos

The figure at the entrance to the second circle of hell who examines sins, judges, and sends souls to their designated level according to how many times he entwines himself.

Ciacco

A character encountered in the third circle of Hell, which is designated for gluttons.

Revenge Tragedies

A genre that flourished during the Renaissance involving ghosts of dead characters returning to the world of the living to right a wrong or address "unfinished business."

Ordo poenarum

A concept in literary representations of the underworld involving punishments of extreme cold and extreme heat.

Chronotype

Distinctive representations of time and space, as well as the human image within that space, often involving narrow spatial constraints in literary hells.

River Styx

A famous river of the underworld often depicted with poisonous water that would dissolve anything except for Charon's ferry.

River Acheron

Translated as "the river of woe," it is a real river in Greece used in literature as a passage to the afterlife.

Cerberus

The three-headed watchdog of the underworld who devours those trying to escape and symbolizes the blurred line between sinners and beasts.

Furies

A terrifying trio of goddesses of vengeance with bloodstained appearances and snakes in their hair, representing evil deeds, words, and thoughts.

Chiron

The wisest of all centaurs who leads the others in guarding sinners who were violent against their neighbors.

Harpies

Creatures with the bodies of birds and heads of human women who, in Dante's underworld, feed on those who have committed suicide.

Minotaur

A personification of rage and bestial nature residing in the circle of violence, depicted with a human torso/head and a bull's body/tail.

Dante's Satan

A wordless, weeping giant demon frozen up to the waist in ice with three faces and bat-like wings, who chews on Brutus, Judas, and Cassius.

Geryon

A figure described with swimming-like motion through "thick and murky air" who grants access to the lower pits of hell associated with fraud.