Research

Marriage promises, fortunes, titles, coins… early modern texts are full of traps and delusions. Not only frauds and scheming in comedies, novellas and the picaresque genre, but also many ambiguous philosophical debates testify to the dynamics of a changing society, thus seeking to and fathom its tensions and developing in the process an appropriate ethic by pointing out gaps and alternatives.
Yet, the capacities of literature are not limited to such ostensible efficacy. Experiencing another person being caught in a trap in the mode of fiction arouses suspense and imaginative engagement which helps to discharge the pressure of one’s own environment. The verbal ruses on the part of female, rural or domestic protagonists level out the patriarchal power system and by identification nourish the agency of the audience. The ludic function of literature becomes manifest in more and more refined peripeties, thus catering to the tastes of an increasingly accomplished literary audience.
Apart from the plot, there are also traps on the level of discourse. The baroque obsession with the motive of (dis)illusion (engaño, inganno) is a case in point; early modern rhetoric exploits its repertoire to the limits by inventing an art of dissimulation: figurative games of transfer like bold metaphors hiding some aspects and highlighting others; academic genres like the quodlibet and paradoxes training the perception of ambiguous phenomena; the moralists’ probabilistic arguments enabling to say only half the truth to save face … in short: the complexity of the modern self comes into being through these symbolic forms. At a collective level, fictional pitfalls refine the capacity to feign, to simulate, in other words: to anticipate future solutions.