Varie11, Public domain

Italo Calvino is one of the great names in world literature and his writing has fascinated readers since the debut in 1947. Still today, his novels, short stories and essays inspire writers, artists, musicians and architects. In occasion of Calvino’s 100th birthday, the Department of Romance Studies and Classics at Stockholm University organizes an international half-day conference followed by a panel discussion with writers, critics and literary scholars. The conference is organized in collaboration with Laboratorio Calvino (University of Rome – La Sapienza), The Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm and the Embassy of Italy. 

Registration

For registration please contact Cecilia Schwartz, cecilia.schwartz@su.se. 

Programme

Keynote lecture: Calvino and the legacy of literary classics (Abstract)

From his earliest short stories and novels Calvino was committed to passing on the values of modern literary classics such as the works of Hemingway, Conrad and Kipling. In the works of the 1950s, particularly in the trilogy, I nostri antenati, he went back to less contemporary classics such as Ariosto, Voltaire and Stendhal. Even his most experimental works such as Le città invisibili were inspired by classic texts such as Marco Polo’s Il milione and Thomas More’s Utopia, while Il castello dei destini incrociati evokes Ariosto and Shakespeare. His final fictional works are also indebted to literary works of the past: Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore draws on modern novels from all over the world, while Palomar is inspired by Valéry’s Monsieur Teste but also by Pliny the Elder and Dante. So the idea of the legacy of classics of literature is bound up with Calvino’s intertextual practice, and is explored in the seminal 1981 essay, Perché leggere i classici. The posthumous Lezioni americane are explicitly concerned with literary legacies: indeed one of the draft English titles he had thought for this work was Six legacies for the incoming millennium. The lecture charts diachronically Calvino’s interest in classic texts of the past and the way he actively exploits their legacy to nourish his own modern and often experimental creativity.