Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature

Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature PDF Author: Eugenio Bolongaro
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802087638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Looking at five of Italo Calvino's often neglected early novels: The Young People of Po, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight, and The Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963, contain a sustained meditation on the role of the intellectual and on the irreducible ethical and political dimension of literature. This meditation provides an insight into a crucial moment in Calvino's development as a writer, and allows Bolongaro to lay the groundwork for a more 'political' reading of Calvino's later work. Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature firmly situates Calvino within his historical context - the cultural revival of post-World War II Italy - by relating these early novels to Calvino's political and critical writings which played an important role in the cultural debates of the time. This approach provides a key to understanding Calvino's work in a new light, ably demonstrating that Calvino's full literary significance cannot be understood in isolation from the politics and cultural movements of the period. One of the few book-length English-language works on Calvino's early writings, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literatur will prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.

Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature

Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature PDF Author: Eugenio Bolongaro
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 9780802087638
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Get Book Here

Book Description
Looking at five of Italo Calvino's often neglected early novels: The Young People of Po, The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, The Non-Existent Knight, and The Watcher, Eugenio Bolongaro argues that these works, written between 1948 and 1963, contain a sustained meditation on the role of the intellectual and on the irreducible ethical and political dimension of literature. This meditation provides an insight into a crucial moment in Calvino's development as a writer, and allows Bolongaro to lay the groundwork for a more 'political' reading of Calvino's later work. Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature firmly situates Calvino within his historical context - the cultural revival of post-World War II Italy - by relating these early novels to Calvino's political and critical writings which played an important role in the cultural debates of the time. This approach provides a key to understanding Calvino's work in a new light, ably demonstrating that Calvino's full literary significance cannot be understood in isolation from the politics and cultural movements of the period. One of the few book-length English-language works on Calvino's early writings, Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literatur will prove to be an indispensable tool to Italianists and literary studies scholars.

The Uses of Literature

The Uses of Literature PDF Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 9780156932509
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
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. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Understanding Italo Calvino

Understanding Italo Calvino PDF Author: Beno Weiss
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 9780872498587
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Highlights Calvino's fascination with folk tales, knights, social & political allegories, & science fiction.

Mapping Complexity

Mapping Complexity PDF Author: Kerstin Pilz
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 9781904744207
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
This book presents an analysis of the dialogue of literature and science that forms a central part of the work of Italo Calvino, one of Italy's best known contemporary authors. It provides an in-depth study of Calvino's interest in scientific models and methods and the ways these have informed his narratives.

Why Read the Classics?

Why Read the Classics? PDF Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0544146379
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A posthumously published collection of thirty-six essays offering Italo Calvino's invigorating and illuminating analysis of his most treasured literary classics.

The Mind of Italo Calvino

The Mind of Italo Calvino PDF Author: Dani Cavallaro
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786456566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was internationally regarded as one of Italy's greatest twentieth century writers. His approach to literature was remarkably adventurous, and he produced a thought-provoking oeuvre. It invited readers to engage themselves with radical thoughts and philosophies, an approach lamentably scarce in contemporary global culture. This book examines Calvino's works of fiction in the context of the philosophical ideas he advanced in his theoretical and critical works. His was an extraordinarily versatile mind, keen on experimenting with a dazzling variety of both fiction and nonfiction forms.

The Author in Criticism

The Author in Criticism PDF Author: Elio Attilio Baldi
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1683931920
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 307

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Book Description
The Author in Criticism:Italo Calvino’s Authorial Image in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom explores the cultural and historic patterns and differences in the critical readings of Italian author Italo Calvino’s works in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Italy. It considers the external factors that contribute to create recognizable patterns in the readings of Calvino’s texts in different contexts. This volume therefore covers, most notably, matters of genre (science fiction, postmodernism), cultural perceptions and conventions, the (re)current image of the author in different media, academic schools, -curricula and -canons, biographical information (such as gender and background), and translation and the language in which the author speaks (or fails to speak) to us. It traces the influence of these aspects in the academic discourse on Calvino. The Author in Criticism also analyzes Calvino’s various professional roles as writer, editor, essayist, journalist, private correspondent, and public, cosmopolitan intellectual, reappraising their often little acknowledged importance for academic criticism. An important underlying idea is that the preconceived image that every critic has of Calvino before even opening one of his books is often solidified and repeated even in the most refined and complex critical analyses. This volume purposefully foregrounds the textual and non-textual parts that are usually considered peripheral to the works of an author, such as book covers, blurbs, reviews, talks, interviews, etc. In this way, this book provides insight into the reception of Calvino’s works in different countries. Moreover, it forms a broader reflection of and on important constants in the workings of literary criticism, and on the way academic discourses have developed in various cultural contexts over the last decades.

Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm

Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm PDF Author: Bridget Tompkins
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1784623296
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Calvino and the Pygmalion Paradigm: Fashioning the Feminine in I nostri antenati and Gli amori difficili is the first book-length analysis of the representation of the feminine in Calvino’s fiction. Using the structural umbrella of the Pygmalion paradigm and using feminist interpretative techniques, this book offers interesting alternative readings of two of Calvino’s important early narrative collections. The Pygmalion paradigm concerns the creation by a male ‘artist’ of a feminine ideal and highlights the artificiality and narcissistic desire associated with the creation process. This book discusses Calvino’s active and deliberate work of self-creation, accomplished through extensive self-commentaries and exposes both the lack of importance Calvino placed on the feminine in his narratives and the relative absence of critical attention focused on this area. Relying on the analogy between Pygmalion’s pieces of ivory and Barthes’ ‘seme’ and drawing upon the ideas underlying Kristevan intertextuality, the book demonstrates that, despite Calvino’s professed lack of interest in character development, his female characters are carefully and purposefully constructed. A close reading of Calvino’s narratives, engaging directly with Freud, Lacan and the feminist psychoanalytical thinking of Kofmann, Kristeva, Kaplan and others, demonstrates how Calvino uses his female characters as foils for the existential reflections of his typically maladjusted and narcissistic male characters.

Writing Architecture in Modern Italy

Writing Architecture in Modern Italy PDF Author: Daria Ricchi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000199509
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Writing Architecture in Modern Italy tells the history of an intellectual group connected to the small but influential Italian Einaudi publishing house between the 1930s and the 1950s. It concentrates on a diverse group of individuals, including Bruno Zevi, an architectural historian and politician; Giulio Carlo Argan, an art historian; Italo Calvino, a fiction writer; Giulio Einaudi, a publisher; and Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese, both writers and translators. Linking architectural history and historiography within a broader history of ideas, this book proposes four different methods of writing history, defining historiographical genres, modes, and tones of writing that can be applied to history writing to analyze political and social moments in time. It identifies four writing genres: myths, chronicles, history, and fiction, which became accepted as forms of multiple postmodern historical stories after 1957. An important contribution to the architectural debate, Writing Architecture in Modern Italy will appeal to those interested in the history of architecture, history of ideas, and architectural education.

The Written World and the Unwritten World

The Written World and the Unwritten World PDF Author: Italo Calvino
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 054423085X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
“Wonderful… Calvino’s prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new.” —Publishers Weekly A rich collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino’s approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature. An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. From classics to contemporary literature, from tradition to the avant-garde, Calvino masterfully explores reading, writing, and translating through careful and illuminating discussion of the works of Bakhtin, Brecht, Cortázar, Thomas Mann, Octavio Paz, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and other uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work—now rendered in English by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein—is a major statement in literary criticism.