A bar in Bethesda‘s 2008 video game, Fallout 3. Complete with a bouncer named Charon.
posted on July 8, 2019 by
Tenth Circle (2008), Lifetime movie based on Jodi Picoult’s novel
“Set in a small village in Maine, Circle features teen orgies, adultery, boy toys, date rape drugs, self-inflicted maiming and a suicide that might be murder.
“All this plays out against the unsubtle backdrop of high school teacher Laura Stone (Kelly Preston) teaching a course in Dante, whose Divine Comedy never foreshadows anything too pleasant.
“In fact, the title of the best-selling Jodi Picoult novel from which the film was adapted suggests Dante didn’t go far enough for the modern world – that where Dante created only nine circles of eternal purgatory, these days we need a 10th.
“Seems that since Dante outlined Hell in the early 14th century, we’ve somehow stepped up our game and developed another level of wickedness.” […] –David Hinckley, NY Daily News, June 27, 2008
posted on September 1, 2017 by
Marcel Möring, In a Dark Wood (2008)
“‘Forget the Purgatorio,’ says a character in Marcel Möring’s new novel, ‘leave the Paradiso unread. Hell and nothing but that. That is the world.’ In this intelligent, literate narrative, the forest that skirts the Dutch town of Assen becomes the dark wood of Dante’s Inferno, while the town itself is depicted as a desolate place of sin and suffering.
[…]
“Homer, Dante, Joyce, Greek myth, Arthurian romance – Möring’s debts are unmistakable, but there’s no sense of a sneaking or slavish dependency on these sources; his unapologetic literary borrowings are a form of celebration. His exuberance sometimes seems hyperactive, but its general effect is compelling. His approach is perhaps best understood through analogy with another art form: at one point he invokes the spirit of Miles Davis, describing the great jazzman ‘going into the studio with a handful of notes and chords and in a hallucinatory session recording Kind of Blue, carrying everyone along with him, with complete confidence in his leadership and the expectation that he will bring them to the place where they have to be.’ Threading the novel’s intricate byways, enjoying the journey for its own sake, we do indeed finish up where we have to be – perhaps registering that, as the Jew of Assen remarks, the crooked path is often the only way to the end.” —Jem Poster, The Guardian, February 13, 2009
The novel, originally published in Dutch under the title Dis, was awarded the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prize for the best Dutch novel in 2007. See the author’s page here.
posted on May 13, 2016 by
Anton Brzezinski, “Anton’s Inferno: Dante’s Inferno Revisited” (2008)
“Surrealist painter Anton Brzezinski takes us on a modern journey through Hell. This time the poet Virgil is replaced by his one time neighbor in New York, the writer William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch. Well known for his Sci Fi illustrations and surrealisms, Anton Brzezinski is a versatile artist who creates in a number of media. Currently he’s completing a feature length video called Adventures of the Living Dali. Anton’s Inferno was written at the same time he created a complex 38 inch by 50 inch oil painting of the same name. This novelette is a sometimes irreverent satire. He cautions if you’re easily offended, please give this to someone with a sense of humor.” —Amazon
posted on June 2, 2011 by
Dante Restaurant, Boston
Dante Restaurant, Boston, MA
Contributed by Krista Gladman (Bowdoin, ’11)
posted on March 27, 2010 by
Louis Andriessen, “La Commedia” (2008)
“On Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 8:00 p.m., Andriessen’s extraordinary new opera La Commedia (based on Dante’s Divine Comedy) makes its New York premiere in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage in a concert performance by the Asko Schoenberg ensemble…
According to the composer, ‘I see Dante’s La Commedia as one of the highest points ever reached in literature and philosophy. It combines complexity, intellectualism, horror, beauty, multi-layering, allusions, historical and mythological references, and, above all, irony. I selected sequences of material in the same order as in Dante’s book. So the first two scenes take us from the City of Dis down through Inferno to the deepest regions of hell where we meet Lucifer in the third part. This is where Adam’s Fall is described. We then pass upward through the lighter-hearted Garden of Earthly Delights until we reach Paradise in the final section, Eternal Light.’
La Commedia was premiered in June 2008 at the Holland Festival by many of the same musicians performing in the Carnegie Hall presentation.” [. . .] —Broadway World, March 1, 2010
See also, Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, April 1, 2010
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
posted on December 3, 2009 by
Fort Lewis College Theater, “Dante’s Inferno” (2008)
“Written by Dante Alighieri.
Adapted for Stage by Desiree Henderson & Kurt Lancaster.
Directed by Kathryn Moller.
Winter 2008: Throughout history, poets and philosophers have struggled to define true love. In the Phaedrus, Socrates explains that love is not simply the act of being caught passionately by a beautiful body or face, but by the eternal form of beauty itself. In Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Romeo describes love as, “too rough, too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like thorn.” And even today, pop stars, authors and actors struggle to define and relate this elusive emotion in a tangible way. Dante Alighieri embarked on a similar quest. In this contemporary stage adaptation of Dante’s Inferno, Dante journeys into the pits of hell searching for the beauty of love which touched him for only an instant. Each circle of hell reveals tragic, and sometimes violent exchanges between people who are damned to repeat their sins again and again.” —Fort Lewis Theatre
Contributed by Katherine Avery
posted on November 16, 2009 by
Elisabeth Tonnard, “In This Dark Wood” (2008)
“This book is a modern gothic. It pairs images of people walking alone in nighttime city streets with 90 different English translations I collected of the first lines of Dante’s Inferno. The images, showing a crowd of solitary figures, are selected from the same archive as used for Two of Us (the extraordinary Joseph Selle collection at the Visual Studies Workshop which contains over a million negatives from a company of street photographers working in San Francisco from the 40’s to the 70’s).
The book is set up in a repetitious way, to stress a sense of similarity, endlessness and interchangeability. The images are re-expressions of each other, and so are the texts.” —Elisabeth Tonnard
Contributed by Guy Raffa (University of Texas – Austin)
posted on April 30, 2009 by
Walt McGough, Dante Dies!! And Then Things Get Weird (2008)
“Seven hundred years ago, Dante Alighieri began writing one of the world’s most compelling and imaginative texts. This June, we respectfully screw it all up.
“Sideshow Theatre proudly presents the world premiere of Dante Dies!! (and then things get weird), a new play by Walt McGough oh-so-loosely based on Mr. Alighieri’s Inferno. Partway along the journey of his life, Dante finds himself mourning a lost love, feeling morose and, for some reason, in Hell. Trying to find his way home, he encounters incredible suffering, infernal bureaucracy, some sins of his own, and the aggressive attention of a competitive hot dog eater. Each step downward brings him closer to a personal reckoning with his own story, and maybe a chance to find an answer or two. Enacting the story single-handedly, versatile performer Matt Fletcher brings over fifteen different characters to life as he tracks Dante’s progress through the nine circles of Hell in this unexpected and epic adventure.” — Sideshow Theatre
Contributed by Patrick Molloy
posted on April 20, 2009 by
“Dante’s Inferno” EA Video Game
“EA introduces an all new original property from the studio behind the hit horror game, Dead Space. The game is based on part one of the medieval epic poem, The Divine Comedy, commonly referred to as Dante’s Inferno, by Dante Alighieri. The dark fiction gave birth to the Tuscan Italian dialect and is widely considered the work that has defined the western world’s contemporary conception of hell and purgatory. The poem tells the tale of Dante who journeys through the twisted, menacing nine circles of hell in pursuit of his beloved Beatrice. Written in the 14th Century, The Divine Comedy, unlike the bible, was published and read aloud in the language of the Italian people, thereby making the poem accessible to the mass public. The poem delivers a striking and allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife and the punishments of hell. In part one, known as Dante’s Inferno, Dante traverses all nine circles of hell; limbo, lust, gluttony, greed, anger, heresy, violence, fraud and treachery.” —EA Games
See Also:
Video Interviews and Previews at EA Games
Contributed by Chelsea Mikulencak (UTexas-Austin, ’10)
“EA Sends Players to Hell in Epic Action Game Dante’s Inferno” by El Mundo Tech, December 15, 2008
Contributed by J. Patrick Brown (Bowdoin, ’08)
“Video Game Draws Interest in Hollywood” by David Itzkoff, The New York Times, November 3, 2008
“Endpaper — Fiction Reaches a New Level” by Tim Martin, The Telegraph, May 7, 2009
Contributed by Aisha Woodward (Bowdoin, ’08)
“Fighting Desire in Dante’s Inferno. Try not to succumb to your lustful urges in Hell.” by Jeff Haynes, IGN.com, September 21, 2009
Contributed by Charlie Russell-Schlesinger (Bowdoin, ’08)
“Dante’s Inferno Story Trailer” by Euro Gamer, November 17, 2009
Contributed by Luke Welch (Bowdoin, ’08)
“You Read It in Class; Now You Can Play It on your Console” by Seth Schiesel, The New York Times, February 8, 2010
“Charting Dante’s Descent Through 9 Circles of Hell” by Mark Oppenheimer, The New York Times, March 26, 2010
“Abandon All Poetry, but Enter Hell With an Attitude” by David Itzkoff, The New York Times, January 29, 2010
“Profs Guy Raffa and Arielle Saiber on EA’s ‘Dante’s Inferno’ Videogame” in The Atlantic, February 26, 2010 and “Prof. Arielle Saiber on the Game” in Future Tense, February 17, 2010
“Prof. Teodolinda Barolini on EA’s ‘Dante’s Inferno’ Videogame” in Entertainment Weekly
