Calvino’s “Rules of Survival”: Six Memos for the Next Millennium
S07
Marguerite Feitlowitz
Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity are the enduring literary values that Calvino explored in the five essays he lived to write for the 1985–86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. One of the most playful and experimental writers of the 20th century, Calvino was a lifelong reader of Dante, Cavalcanti, Shakespeare, Ovid, virtually the whole of the Renaissance and the major Golden Ages, as well as folklore and myth. In these intense readings of venerable, recent, and contemporary literature, Calvino evolves his theory, or better said, his defense of literature. Our readings will radiate outward from Six Memos (the centerpiece of our seminar) as we follow Calvino’s at once true and curving path through centuries of great writing.