VCU news

By Dina Weinstein

The past three years have been hell, and there’s plenty of proof.

“There was like a zillion articles that 2020 was the year from hell,” said Christopher Martiniano, an instructor in Virginia Commonwealth University’s Department of Focused Inquiry.

So it made perfect sense to him to teach a class on the topic. That’s how his five-week online summer course – ENGL 215: Greetings from Hell – came into being.

Life during the first years of the pandemic was especially difficult, so Martiniano felt that students would have life experience and perspective to explore. Timely pop culture would provide fodder, too.

“‘Lucifer’ on Netflix was a huge show in 2020. And Lil Nas X had just dropped the record ‘Montero,’ and it has all of these illusions to ‘Paradise Lost’ and even to the ‘Inferno’ and to other literary depictions of hell,” Martiniano said. “So, there's just so many references to hell going on toward the end of 2020 that I was like, you know what, this seems to be the zeitgeist right now.”

Martiniano’s doctoral program specialized in 18th-century literature and art, so he melded classic approaches into the more modern ones in the class. For anchor discussions in Greetings from Hell, he used four main literary works: Dante’s “Inferno,” “Paradise Lost” by John Milton, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” by William Blake and a graphic version of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid's Tale.”

“The arc to the class is, in the beginning, we're looking at hell as a space outside of you, other than you – it's a space you go to,” he said, citing Dante’s journey through hell and purgatory as an example. Then the class turned to “heaven and stuff – those spaces beyond us.”

Students also examined passages of “The Aeneid” by Virgil, with each work establishing a bridge to the next.

“In ‘Paradise Lost,’ hell is a space that's separate from us, but yet at the same time … Satan is able to move around freely and finally get to the Garden of Eden on earth,” Martiniano said. “It's psychological, like the famous line, ‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.’ That’s basically what Satan’s doing. John Milton calls it an unhappy mansion.”

Dante‘s “Inferno” features nine circles of hell, while “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” reflects how the actual environment in cities like London had become hell on earth.

“There is no alternative or space beyond us. We made this hell,” Martiniano said. “And then when we get to ‘The Handmaid's Tale,’ it's almost like hell is us. We are using power over people. The characters corroborate with the power to enslave themselves and are indeed hell unto themselves.”

Martiniano also takes students through 20th-century dystopian psychological works such as George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.”

Use of imagery also helps Martiniano teach the concept of hell, with the violence of the French, American and Haitian revolutions providing a framework to consider suffering. Students then can see how their version of hell is just as relevant as Milton's or Dante's or Atwood’s.

“Right off the bat, when I say ‘define your hell,’ students all have an idea,” Martiniano said. “And then using that as a reference point, I show how, over time, ideas or concepts of hell are ideologically, historically and culturally constructed, even within a faith.”

A vivid starting point

Even the class syllabus for Greetings from Hell reflects Martiniano’s sensibility. It’s dazzlingly graphic – shorter than most but chock full of images of hell, both historical and contemporary. He says such an approach makes course materials more engaging, interactive and relatable immediately – an opening through which students can enter a subject.

Martiniano sees a syllabus as a story itself and not a typical contract. During a Zoom presentation last year to his Focused Inquiry colleagues, he emphasized how a syllabus can impact students.

“I want it to have a narrative showing, what are the questions we're trying to answer? What are we looking at? What are the larger issues that come with whatever we're talking about?” he said during the session. “I wanted to set the expectations of what class time will be like. And so I use heavily visual, heavily multimedia materials in class, engaging with all kinds of images, photos, art, video, sound and music. And part of that also is to be unexpected, to be non-obvious. I think that's really important.”

To pique students’ curiosity about Greetings from Hell, Martiniano also created a teaser for the course. 

The graphic approach helps students track along with the texts and think about how to consider passages. “It also helps them dimensionalize it a little bit more,” Martiniano said. “For our classes, within Canvas, there's a virtual meeting space called Big Blue Button. And it's much more interactive than, say, a Zoom or even Google.”

Using that feature, students can draw over illustrations he shows in class to make points and analyze messages.

Martiniano’s approach to mixing visuals and text, and even incorporating artificial intelligence, stems from his decades-long background as an art director for advertising firms before he shifted to academia.

“In advertising, it's ‘innovate or die.’ I bring that same attitude to our university’s focus on problem-solving – specifically, my focus on identifying the actual, solvable ‘problem.’ That was 60% of my work as a creative director: trying to understand the client's real problem that we were solving with marketing,” he said.

"In this class, it's how do we understand hell as an ideologically, historically constructed concept in a mostly secular world? Is it still relevant? What can we learn from why/how these historical, artistic constructions of hell were represented? What is their purpose, and what ‘problem’ do they solve for?”

AI + students = creativity

Martiniano uses AI tools for assignments to spur discussions and help students verbalize their ideas and observations – about hell and more.

“The whole point for me of [students] using AI in this class is because English 215 in particular is getting students to be able to develop the skills of reading closely, but also textual analysis,” he said. “And prompt engineering, or prompt writing for any generative AI, is reverse engineering – basically, textual analysis. You need to keyword stuff – be very deliberate and intentional about the words you use to get the desired outputs.”

Analysis delves into the concept of fear found in the various literary works. Martiniano also led students to explicitly define hell as well as heaven.

“I encourage them to go ask ChatGPT, and they can get ideas,” he said. “It can help them articulate their own ideas, like in ways they haven't necessarily thought of because of how ChatGPT summarizes things.”

And by facing AI head-on, he said, students learn that ChatGPT is not a good tool for plagiarism.

“It's C-level work. It's Wikipedia-level work,” Martiniano said. “ChatGPT can't do analysis. Oftentimes it's wrong. And so, we'll actually look at conversations that I'll have every day with ChatGPT. We'll say, how would you (a) grade this response, and then (b), what would be your follow up? Because it's iterative.”

Other assignments in Greetings from Hell involve examining text passages to identify the tone and important keywords to create an audiobook of a poem, with music and sound effects mined from various sources.

Illustrating the points

Martiniano emphasized the value of visuals in his course, both for imagination and analysis.

“All the texts that we look at are illustrated in some form or fashion, and it's fairly easy because Dante's ‘Inferno’ is one of the greatest works in Western literary history. And so, there's tons and tons of illustrated versions of it,” he said.

Martiniano uses illustrations of a text to analyze with students how they would render a scene or passage, or if they think illustrators are more literal or interpretive.

“We looked at [French artist] Gustav Doré’s illustrations for Book II of ‘Paradise Lost’ compared to John Martin's, who's also contemporary but English. And the students were able to attack really quickly how John Martin's illustrations more focus on light and darkness, specifically darkness, and Dore’s illustrations focus more on figures falling and descending,” Martiniano said.

Marisa Payne, a student in Greetings from Hell, said what intrigued her about the course was how it's not just a study of how people from long ago thought about hell, but it includes modern interpretations – as well and how hell can be both a physical and conceptual place.

“I think mixing both literary and historical contexts on this topic really allows me to understand how the concept of hell came to be and how we perceive it these days, like how it grew, changed and stayed consistent all at the same time,” said Payne, an English major in the College of Humanities and Sciences with a creative writing minor.

“Having never used AI of any sort before, it was really interesting to learn that we would be using it to help describe and understand our own interpretations of hell,” said Payne, who created a grim image of hell – in the style of Vincent van Gogh – where the sky watches a sea of fire filled with people. “You can only go so far just trying to describe it with words.”

Martiniano said he hopes to offer Greetings from Hell again. He is scheduled to lean into concepts he experimented with during the summer class, in a course on creativity and AI that he will co-teach in the upcoming school year.