 Jon at the 2007 Venice Biennale 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, especially Italy. He has also produced a number of essays and translations concerning modern and postmodern Italy and Europe. Among his books are:
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  See the University of California Press website for more information on the hardback edition. Dissimulation is now available as an e-book from the University of California Press. An Italian translation is also in preparation.  Love in the Mirror (ISBN 978-0-7727-2051-1) 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 unexpected consequences for the institution of marriage. See http://www.crrs.ca/pdf/pubs/OV02disc.pdf for more information and an order form for the paperback edition. If you are interested in the electronic or e-book edition, please download the order form at the bottom of this page.   [This is a poster for the little-known 1999 film version of Andreini's comedy (dir. Salvatore Maira); some clips are currently available on YouTube] 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. He also has a translation/edition of the late Italian postmodern architect Aldo Rossi's Quaderni azzurri (1968-1992) near completion for the Getty HRI, and has presented portions of his most recent research on Rossi at various North American venues in 2011 and 2012.  For his essay, entitled "Bodies of Water: The Mediterranean in Italian Baroque Theater," see the first issue (Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009-2010) of the on-line open access journal California Italian Studies: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8dv7n1dk Further abstracts and links concerning his publications may be found at: www.academia.edu 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. |