In this collection of essays directly emerging from my experience with electronic media, I discuss current perspectives on scholarship and pedagogy, in the age of digital incunabula. Here are some of the questions I address: do digital media promote a new type of "encyclopedic" learning, based on learning communities sharing common cognitive "values"? Or do they foster, instead, new forms of fragmentary knowledge, thinking and "values"? How can electronic media enhance our historical understanding of texts (and other cultural products) belonging to a distant cultural past? More specifically: how can literary and philosophical works of the Italian tradition as diverse as Boccaccio's Decameron (the narrative epic of early Modern mercantile world), Pico's Oratio (the "manifesto" of Renaissance humanism) or Calvino's "hypernovels" (the expression of a cybernetic society) suggest new modes of thought for 21st-century humanism? I see the main challenge of this book as translating into critical discourse the new cognitive values emerging from my experimentation with digital technology, for the benefit of scholars, teachers and students engaged in these practices, as well as all those readers interested in the future (the present) of the humanities.

Every spring semester since 1993, I have been teaching a course on Boccaccio's Decameron: this course is now connected to the Decameron Web project. As for my personal re-reading of Boccaccio's masterpiece, it is gradually being woven into a web of essays, published both online (in pre-print format) on the Decameron Web or in literary journals, to be then collected in a book. In the first and introductory essay (published in Italian on the journal Italian Quarterly), I read the Decameron as an antidote to lovesickness, within the classical and medieval, literary and medical tradition of melancholy. In the following chapters, I move on to explore the virtual space designed by the text as a garden of delight, both rhetorical playground and ethical labyrinth, in which the reader is invited to find his/her own path. A first step of this exploration is a forthcoming essay (in English) on the "purgatorial" nature of Boccaccio's Eden, which will appear as a chapter in a forthcoming volume on Paradise on Earth, edited by Gina Psaki and Pier Cesare Bori.

Toward the Blue Peninsula/Verso la penisola blu. A Hypertextual Journey

Return to Massimo Riva's home page