Milli mála - 01.01.2011, Blaðsíða 148

148
Abstract:
A critical study of Six Memos for
the Next Millennium by Italo Calvino
In 1986, on the occasion of the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton
Poetry Lectures, Italo Calvino was invited to give a series of talks at
Harvard University. He was the first Italian writer in history to be
given such an honour. Calvino was supposed to give six lectures on
the function and the destiny of literature, but he died in September
1986, a few weeks before going to the U.S. The typescript of those
lectures, collected and edited by Calvino’s wife and published under
the title Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Italian title: Lezioni
americane, sei proposte per il prossimo millennio) three years after his
death, has been considered Calvino’s major scholarly work. It has
been translated into more than fifteen languages and used on
numerous academic courses, in Italy and abroad, as a model of com-
parative method.
According to Calvino himself, he never had a vocation for theo-
ry; on the contrary, he always tended to consider theories, in gen-
eral, as “gadgets”, or “amusements” to play with, as he claimed in
an interview a few months before his death.
The aim of this article is to show that the comparative method
Calvino adopted in his Six Memos has several weak aspects to it (i.e.
contrived comparisons among authors, apodictic – instead of dialec-
tic and problematic – judgments or assertions) which testify his
aforementioned attitude towards theory. On the other hand, this
article, which does not follow the generally enthusiastic critical
reception of Calvino’s Six Memos, analyses the reasons why this work
is a worldwide best seller nevertheless. The article concludes by
emphasizing the fact that Calvino’s method is “easy”, that is to say
it does not require particular literary competencies, in terms of his-
torical, exegetic or philological knowledge. The method therefore
suits many contemporary academic departments of humanities,
UNO STUDIO CRITICO SULLE LEZIONI AMERICANE DI CALVINO