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Loading... The Uses of Literature (original 1980; edition 1987)by Italo Calvino
Work InformationThe Uses of Literature by Italo Calvino (1980)
![]() No current Talk conversations about this book. ![]() ![]() One comes away from this collection of intellectually playful essays by Italy's foremost modern novelist inspired to go back and reread the body of his fiction in the light of his reflections on literature. -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt 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. no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesGli struzzi [Einaudi] (219)
In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume. Translated by Patrick Creagh. No library descriptions found. |
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![]() GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)800Literature By Topic Literature (Belles-Lettres and Rhetoric)LC ClassificationRatingAverage:![]()
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