The Uses of Literature

Assunto encerrado: discursos sobre literatura e sociedade é um livro em que está reunido pelo autor diversos Ensaios, Conferências , Artigos, Entrevistas que foram acumuladas na década de 50. Nestes escritos Calvino faz uma relação da Literatura, Sociedade e Natureza, com intuito de dar um fim a estes tópicos assim levantados por ele. Neste volume Italo nos traz numa conversa sincera e carregada de crítica, com "declarações poéticas", "planejamentos de rotas a seguir" no plano literário. Sendo que a "ambição juvenil" de que partiu o autor, foi a de apontar um "projeto de construção de uma nova literatura que por sua vez servisse para a construção de uma nova sociedade".

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 show more 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. show less