Performance on this year’s Chaucer exam was, on the whole, excellent. The majority of students showed an admirable knowledge of both Chaucer’s own writings and the texts that informed these. The understanding of both was, for the most part, impressive – in some cases very impressive indeed. A sizeable number of candidates had ventured widely – sometimes very widely – in their reading, and were ...

In this paper, we describe the integration of Natural Language Processing (NLP) within an emotional planner to support Interactive Storytelling. Our emotional planner is based on a standard HSP planner, whose originality is drawn from altering the agents’ beliefs and emotional states. Each character is driven by its own planner, while characters are able to operate on their reciprocal feelings ...

Ugo Foscolo, was an Italian poet whose works rank among the masterpieces of Italian literature. Talented and well educated in philosophy, classics, and Italian literature, Foscolo gave literary expression to his ideological aspirations and to the numerous amorous experiences in odes, sonnets, plays, poems and an epistolary novel. Concurrent with his rich literary output, Foscolo's correspondenc...

The authors investigate to what extent differential equations can describe the dynamics of love relations in masochistic novellas. Unlike previous researchers, they base their analysis not only on psychological credibility. They relate their model to the ideas of literary criticism. The authors compare Ivan Turgenev’s Torrents of Spring with the most famous masochistic novella Venus in Furs by ...

Literary pedagogy occupied a privileged place in Bourdieu’s early work on education insofar as he saw it as exemplifying in unconscious mode socially segregational dynamics. Bourdieu’s expressly ‘reductionist’ critique was uncannily mirrored, however, by the spread of more economically instrumental approaches to education. Bourdieu’s engagement with these led him to develop a fuller apprehensio...

The present paper suggests an application of ontologies in the analysis of a literary phenomenon. Starting from the needs of humanistic research and from the availibility on the Web of Language Resources, the adoption of such methodology, whose reference tool is an ontology, has led to a deeper analysis of the “Dualism Truth vs. Propaganda” in Karl Kraus’s writings and of the novel “Cloud, cast...

Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid, (MGS) is widely recognized by both gamers and industry professionals as one of the most influential games of all time. In this paper we contend that one of the ways in which the literary merit of a game can be explained is through the use of close critical literary readings of the game text together with a discussion of how the yielded interpretations work colle...