ABSTRACT:

If, in accordance with the most general premises of the interdisciplinary research project "Cultures of the Performative”, culture is perceived as a process and written texts are seen not merely as the sediments of a cultural dynamic, but also as transitory and transformational moments of that dynamic, then the proliferation of the dialogue in the Renaissance will appear in a new light, too.

In the first phase of this project this proliferation of dialogue was understood primarily in terms of the communicative and cognitive potential of the oral discussion staged within the dialogue text, with that discussion being taken as the ideal-typical mode of realizing a perspectival concept of truth. Now, we will try, furthermore, to understand the proliferation of dialogue also on the basis of functions which arise directly from the interplay of text-internal and text-external pragmatics. This explanatory approach adds a historical-functional perspective to the epistemological one: the Renaissance dialogue's typical forms of realization can now be described as a cultural praxis which not only produces theoretical discourses and pursues defined goals of argumentation, but also projects, constitutes or even subverts discourse communities.

In the second project phase

(a) this approach, which was first developed in the context of our discussion of the (early) humanist Latin dialogue, will be appropriately modified and systematically applied to the 16th-century vernacular dialogue in Italy and, to some extent, in France (subproject 1).

(b) the area of investigation will be expanded to the Iberian peninsula; paradigmatic texts by Spanish authors in contact with Italian humanists will be used to investigate (1) how the innovations of the humanist dialogue are modified for the predominantly clerical and courtly context of the Iberian peninsula, as well as (2) the role played by the evolution of the autochthonous dialogue model (subproject 2);

(c) the relation between "science” and "dialogue” in the Cinque- and early Seicento will be investigated more closely so as to redefine the interdependence between the use of dialogue and the specifics of the Renaissance as a distinct period in intellectual history.




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