Hi, I’m Nina. I am a Ph.D student in Comparative Literature at Dublin City University, Ireland. My project focuses on literary representations of virtual worlds and it is funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.
My particular interests are theories of representation and imagination, all immersive online environments but particularly MMOs, video games in general, information technology and literature.
This blog is intended to host both my outwardly academic and not-so-immediately-academic musings. I want to write about games that I play, books that I read, my adventures in the PhD-land, as well as the occasional mini-essay on a topic that catches my fancy.
Vivid description refers to enargeia, a quality in Classical rhetorics intended to so engage the listener that he or she felt they were personally involved in the events described. This was an essential part of a technique known as ekphrasis, an emotional, engaging, even immersive delivery of words.
I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds – No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a King’s bodyguard – then “Tragedy with scepter’d pall comes sweeping by.” According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Troilus, and repeating those lines, “I wander like a lost Soul upon the stygian Banks staying for waftage,” I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone.
Keats, in a letter
