Agnition

(21) Furthermore, the melodramatic dimension of the scene is accentuated by an agnition effect, the "counterfeited" revelation of a truth known to the audience but ignored by at least one of the characters.

It calls instead for a personal "agnition" on the part of the viewers, unique because it is based on personal relations with memories, experiences, and things.

This reunion bears all the signs of melodramatic belatedness that characterizes many maternal melodramas of the 1940s and 1950s, where the dramatic moment of agnition routinely comes too late, when all opportunities to act on the knowledge gained in that moment have been lost, as in Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life.

There is then a further distancing from classical ideals by a reversal of the conventional topos of agnition, whereby in Aretino's case the protagonist discovers that his spouse is of the same sex as himself, perhaps following Castiglione's conviction that it is the unexpected in a burla that induces laughter, and Finotti further indicates that it is also in its style that the Marescalco is unexpected and succeeds in its experimentation.

If 'Agnition is a "moving" device when it comes too late', (21) then it logically follows that, if it comes just in time, it has the opposite effect--of resolving a potentially tragic situation through reconciliation rather than through tears.

He made his task difficult for himself by differentiating the second drama from the first in genre, assigning it not to the pastoral but to the `complex genre' (genere implesso) which means a double intrigue and agnition.(25) There is here a reflection also of the pastoral/heroic duality as practised in 1736 and 1740.

HANNAM, ROBERT, AgNition Inc., 100 Stone Road West, Suite 109,

Among Italians, there are Giovanni Nencioni (1967), author of the essay 'Agnizioni di lettura' ('Reading agnitions') (which gave an important cue to Conte (1972) himself); Marco de Marinis, who deals with theatrical intertextuality but then widens his horizon to a more general reflection, too; and semiotics experts such as D'Ippolito, Umberto Eco and Cesare Segre.

The editor also considerably clarifies an otherwise confusing array of double identities, name changing and agnitions deriving from the underlying Terentian and Plautine inspiration.