Theories of Dialogue in Grice -- and early Italian Renaissance -- grisotto

Luigi Speranza

Jon R. Snyder is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. At UCSB he serves as Chair of the Department of French and Italian, and is also Chair of the Consortium on Literature, Theory and Culture (CLTC). He has taught at the University of California in San Diego, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, as well as at the University of Turin
and the University of Macerata in Italy. Jon Snyder has published and lectured extensively on the literatures, arts and cultures of early modern Europe, including a recent cycle of talks concerning theories of the Baroque, presented in Italian at the Istituto degli Studi Filosofici in Naples in February 2009. His most recent books are:

• L'estetica del Barocco (The Aesthetics of the Baroque), written and published in Italian in 2005 and translated into Portuguese in 2007
•Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, which appeared in the US in August 2009
•Love in the Mirror, which was published in Canada at the end of 2009


L'estetica del Barocco (ISBN 978-88-15-10779-4) takes the Baroque to be the first global artistic movement, in which revolutionary new ways of representing and narrating sensual and spiritual experience were developed and disseminated on a vast scale. Baroque aesthetics constituted the attempt to "think through" this contemporary cultural phenomenon without recourse to a genuine philosophy of art, which would emerge only in the eighteenth century. The book examines the principal concepts and themes embedded in Baroque aesthetic thought in Europe, which were essential to early modern art and artists: wit, concettismo, genius, illusion, imagination, the psychology of art, the fragment, the "je ne sais quoi" and others. The "je ne sais quoi" or "non so che" in many ways embodies the Baroque view of art: it eludes any fixed definition, but is there to capture "the immense subtlety of things" (Leibniz) and the mysterious "consonance" (Gracián) between them and us. For more information, see: http://www.mulino.it/edizioni/universita/scheda_volume.php?vista=scheda&ISBNART=10779

"Larvatus prodeo," announced René Descartes at the beginning of the seventeenth century: "I come forward, masked." Deliberately disguising or silencing their most intimate thoughts and emotions, many early modern Europeans besides Descartes-princes, courtiers, aristocrats and commoners alike-chose to practice the shadowy art of dissimulation. For men and women who could not risk revealing their inner lives to those around them, this art of incommunicativity was crucial, both personally and politically. Many writers and intellectuals sought to explain, expose, justify, or condemn the emergence of this new culture of secrecy, and from Naples to the Netherlands controversy swirled for two centuries around the powers and limits of dissimulation, whether in affairs of state or affairs of the heart. Dissimulation and the Culture of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe is an interdisciplinary study of subject-formation among early modern elites in Italy, France, Spain and elsewhere in Europe, as seen through the lens of the debate over dissimulation and the uses of secrecy.
See http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9282.php for more information. An Italian translation is in preparation for 2010.

Love in the Mirror is instead a bilingual edition of the unique 1622 experimental Baroque comedy by G.B. Andreini entitled Amor nello specchio, with a lengthy translator's introduction and critical apparatus. This volume, which is the second in the new Toronto series of "The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe," offers English-speaking readers a chance to encounter the most important and innovative Italian comic playwright of the seventeenth century, whose interests are akin to those of far better-known authors such as Shakespeare, Corneille and Calderón. Love in the Mirror tells the path-breaking story of a passionate love affair between two women in early modern Florence. Despite the risk of social sanctions, Florinda and Lidia freely consent to love each other “breast to breast and mouth to mouth,” triggering comic confusion as well as a surprising dénouement with notable consequences for the institution of marriage. See http://www.crrs.ca/pdf/pubs/OV02disc.pdf for more information and an order form.

[This is a poster for the little-known 1999 film version of Andreini's comedy (dir. Salvatore Maira)]

Jon Snyder is currently completing two book-length manuscripts: a new translation/edition of Torquato Accetto's 1641 masterpiece entitled

"Della dissimulazione onesta"
(On honest dissimulation)


and a study of Baroque anamorphosis in art and literature.

[The title page of one of the extremely rare extant copies of Accetto's treatise]

For his most recent (March 2010) essay, entitled "Bodies of Water: The Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Theater," see the first issue (Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009-2010)
of the new on-line opean access journal California Italian Studies: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dv7n1dk

Born in Chicago, Jon grew up in Essex, Connecticut. He studied Comparative Literature at Princeton (AB 1976) and Yale (MPhil 1979; PhD 1982).
Now a resident of Santa Barbara, he enjoys tending his orchard, sailing, exploring the contemporary arts and traveling abroad in his free time. You may download Jon R. Snyder's complete academic cv by clicking on the link below.
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