UQ’s School of Communication and Arts is pleased to announce the publication of Associate Professor Emma Cole’s new edited collection, Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity: From Narrative to Virtual Reality.
This book emerged from a conference Emma convened during her UKRI grant ‘Punchdrunk on the Classics’. It brings together scholars from across the full spectrum of the arts and humanities to explore the links between experiencing immersion in antiquity
and modernity.
From ancient Greece through to the present moment, individuals have been interested in theorising the relationship between reality and virtual realities, and in contemplating whether feeling present in an alternate universe should be a sought-after experience or something deemed problematic and dangerous. The chapters in this book explore the warnings against immersion voiced by Plato and embodied in the figure of the Homeric sirens, contrasted with the pro-immersion perspectives championed by Aristotelian mimesis and embodied in the concept of enargeia. They also examine the integration of the ancient world into a range of modern novels, games, museum exhibitions, and theatrical performances that can be described as immersive, while practice-as-Research contributions explore the benefits of this synergy from practitioner perspectives. Overall, the book uncovers previously unforeseen connections regarding immersive experiences across media forms and academic disciplines, and lays the groundwork for future research and new, antiquity-inspired, immersive experiences.
