The Uses of Literature: Essays
This volume of essays is a kind of intellectual autobiography of Italo Calvino (1923-1985), one of the greatest Italian writers of the 20th century, often cited as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Selected by the author himself, the texts have been repeatedly republished and translated into dozens of languages.
Italian novelist and short story writer Calvino has been accused of making protons, quarks and living cells talk as if they were people, but here he defends his approach as a kind of animism attuned to the way the universe works. His fascination with myth is evident in pieces on Ovid's Metamorphoses and the separate odysseys that make up Homer's Odyssey. Three intertwined essays on French utopian socialist Fourier present him as a precursor of Women's Lib, a satirist and visionary thinker whose scheme for a society in which each person's desires could be satisfied deserves to be taken seriously. In other pieces, Calvino brings a fresh, unpredictable approach to why we should reread the classics, how cinema and comic strips influence writers, and the cartoon universe of Saul Steinberg. His message is that writers need to establish erotic communion with the humdrum objects of everyday reality.
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (October 15, 1923 – September 19, 1985) (pronounced [ˈiːtalo kalˈviːno]) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels, born in Cuba and brought up in San Remo, Italy. He is renowned for his short stories and novels. His best known works include the "Our Ancestors" trilogy (1952-1959), the "Cosmicomics" collection of short stories (1965), and the novels "Invisible Cities" (1972) and "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" (1979). During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared a series of lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. His lecture notes were published posthumously in Italian in 1988 and in English as "Six Memos for the Next Millenium" in 1993.
Lionised in Britain and America, he was, at the time of his death, the most translated contemporary Italian writer, one of the most influential intellectuals in Europe, a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Italo Calvino's works are absolutely essential for the comprehension of past century. The Cuba-born author has a formal academic education in fine arts and literature, which would greatly affect his later career as a journalist, social activist and literary researcher, forever questioning and provoking the limits of writing and of literature itself. As a member of the experimental French group Oulipo, Calvino wrote one of the cornerstones of XXth century literature – “If on a winter’s night a traveler” (1979) – a collection of unfinished novels that still remains as one of the most genuine explanations in love to the world of literature.
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