Renato Barilli is professor of the phenomenology of styles at the University of Bolonga. He has published numerous books in Italian on poetics, cultural theory, and contemporary art, inculding Culturologia e fenomenologia degli stili, L’arte contemporanea, and II ciclo del postmoderno. The University of Minnesota Press has also published a translation of his Rhetoric (1989).
Karen Pinkus is currently assistant professor of Italian at Northwestern University. Her interests include psychoanalysis and the relation of visual and verbal arts. She is the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Language and Death (Minnesota, 1991).