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SIDNEY-SPENSER  June 2003

SIDNEY-SPENSER June 2003

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Subject:

Re: Sprezzatura as sixteenth-century cool

From:

Marshall Grossman <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Sidney-Spenser Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 3 Jun 2003 20:53:43 -0400

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Is it worth mentioning that on the current scene, the imitative vector is
reversed, and the privileged adopt (co-opt) the styles and rhythms of what
they take to be 'street life'?  Maybe?  Because we then recall that the
mass culture appropriation of a group then returns to shape and influence
the very group in which it originated:  As for example,  gangsters imitate
the Godfather movies and gangstas copy syle points from gangsta videos.
All of which is to point out the complications of analogy between our
'administered society' and the provenance of sprezzatura, which is
restricted to an enclosed group defined internally by class but externally
by bi-lingual literacy.  So, I would think that the downward movement of
sprezzatura to the genrty would be fairly limited to those close enough to
court to be wannabees--Malvolio supercilliousness is probably an fair
example of failed sprezzatura in this sort of context.  On the other hand,
a "salvage man" may trump a Calidore, precisely by expressing the behaviors
that sprezzatura values, without any sprezzatura at all.  In this respect
sprezzatura is at least to some extent, self-cancelling.  What could be
less cool than working at being cool?

With this in mind, I suggest forgoing the elegance of 'cool' or 'hip' in
favor of some clumsy detail, as in "a studied affectation of intuitive
mastery." I think students have a pretty good idea of what that might be.

As for modern analogies, I remember once hearing Angus Fletcher suggest
looking to sports as a way to comprehend renaissance virtuosity. Basketball
may be the truest current analog. The audience knows how impossibly hard
the moves are, and knows and appreciates the work that the atheletes put
into making it look easy.

At 01:44 PM 6/3/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>  "[I]f the nobility start eating with forks, then before long the
>gentry will too.Š"
>
>If nobles do this, it's because they're nobles; if before long gentry
>do it, it's because they aren't nobles.
>
>
>
>
>
>>On Tuesday, June 03, 2003, at 01:55PM, Glenn A. Steinberg
>><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>
>>>[log in to unmask] wrote:
>>>
>>>>  I too have struggled with this. As Jon Quitslund says, the problem with
>>>>  "cool," good though it is, is class: Gladys Brooks has a devastating
little
>>>>  first ironic and then tragic poem about ghetto kids that starts "We real
>>>>  cool"--not what Castiglione had in mind, of course, even if one
eliminates
>>>>  Brooks's irony....
>>>
>>>On the other hand, in the white, suburban high schools of my youth,
>>>"cool" did
>>>have class associations (if not quite Castiglione's).  The "cool
>>>kids" weren't
>>>the poor or the minority students.  They were the children of "the
beautiful
>>>people" -- perhaps the closest thing we have in the U.S. to
>>>aristocrats.  Being
>>>"cool" back then meant being in a position not to have to care about
anything
>>>(since popularity, money, college admission, and future employment were all
>>>secure) -- hence the sense of "careless ease" that characterized
>>>those who were
>>>"cool."
>>
>>Glenn, I suspect that even the "cool kids" didn't always feel that
>>they were so but were probably imitating those they perceived as
>>cooler than themselves.  And that reminds me of Norbert Elias's
>>model of the civilizing process and how manners and mores tend to
>>migrate downward on the social scale; if the nobility start eating
>>with forks, then before long the gentry will too, and so on.
>>
>>With that in mind, "cool" and "sprezzatura" may be alike not so much
>>as identifiers of static social attitudes or registers (and various
>>folks have mentioned how such a comparison could be misleading) but
>>rather as tropes that describe social movement and imitation.  The
>>practitioners of both are acting as though they are better than they
>>know themselves to be, and the humanist court and the high school
>>hallway are both places of cascading perceptions where the
>>successful imitators of this behavior are themselves imitated in
>>turn.  Pretty soon everyone's cool (I was going to add "or trying to
>>be" but that would be redundant).
> 
Marshall Grossman
Professor of English
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742

[log in to unmask]

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