Word: calvino
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Harvard invited Calvino, the author of Cosmicomics, If on a winter's night a traveller, and Invisible Cities, to deliver the Norton lectures for 1985-86. Calvino conceived the lectures as memos, terse essays about aspects of prose style that had marked his own fiction and would be important for the literature of the future. Calvino identified six qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. At his death, on the eve of his departure for America, he had written and completed the first five of these lectures...
...Memos for the Next Millenium is a slim and dense book. Calvino discusses every form of narrative, from the prose poems of Francis Ponge and the micro-essays of Jorge Luis Borges (quickness) to the encyclopedic and incomplete novels of Robert Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda (multiplicity). He addresses a variety of literary problems. In his essay on visibility, for example, he contrasts visual and verbal imaginations, examining the prefabricated images of the mass media and their control over how we create pictures from words and words from pictures...
...CALVINO tackles questions that have puzzled the driest and most difficult literary critics of the century, but he does not share their obsession for inventing or redefining terms. He does not bully the reader with tortuous grammar, or leave gaps and ambiguities in his logic as examples of the defects in language itself; his sentences are clear and simple. "There is a lightening of language," Calvino posits, "whereby meaning is conveyed through a verbal texture that seems weightless, until the meaning itself takes on the same rarefied consistency...
...effort to convey complex ideas about literature, Calvino's most effective tools are mythology and visual imagery--what he calls icastic imagery, an archaic word in English, though common in Italian, from the Greek eikastikos, meaning "figurative...
...explains his notion of textual lightness, for example, with the story of how Perseus slew the Medusa. In Calvino's allegory, the Medusa, whose gaze turns men to stone, freezes language with paralyzing weight. Perseus destroys the Medusa with lightness: he flies above her, and he only looks at her indirectly, in the mirror of his shield. Indirection and change are as important to Calvino's lightness as the subtraction of weight...