Discussion on Italo Calvinos Famous Book

Who is Italo Calvino?

Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. The most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature

Literature and Humanism

Humanism: great intellectual movement of Renaissance Italy. Humanists believed that the Greek and Latin classics contained both the lessons one needed to live a moral life and the best models for a powerful Latin style.

Literature and Humanism

They developed a new, rigorous kind of classical scholarship, with which they corrected and tried to understand the works of the Greeks and Romans, which seemed so vital to them.

The Humanist/Ethical Approach

The effect the work has on the audience/ reader. The larger function of literature is to teach morality and to probe philosophical issues. Literature should instruct and delight "Good" work has a positive, enriching, impact on the reader; "bad" work has negative, dulling, impact.

Why read the classics?

The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say, "I am rereading . . . " and never "I am reading . . . We use the words "classics" for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them

Why read the classics?

Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading. A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. The classics are books which, upon reading, we find even fresher, more unexpected, and more marvelous than we had thought from hearing about them.

Why read the classics?

A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.