2:00 PM, Friday the 25th at WB #207

(Please note that, rather than pre-circulating the paper, Roni will present his work in full on Friday)

The demystification of literature leads Calvino to reconsider its potential, its role as a major tool of the human being, because in fact it should be considered as a tool like others in his possession. The literature is one of those “re-representative” techniques (to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett) that intervene effectively on the perception of man. The peculiarity of Calvino’s prose consists in not hiding at all the nature of literature as a model of the possible models. Literature is the means by which man “experiences” the possibilities of the world, or, in other words, is the means by which the world and its possibilities reach the man. Calvino’s singular effort is to be found especially in this multi-dimensional and multi-disciplinary representation of a world to be considered far and wide, in micro and macro, in the history and in the possibilities. Two, three are the new major coordinates that Calvino by means of a project was willing to give to his literary discourse, as is clear from the various interventions: a cosmic speech in which to keep in mind the fate of the species accompanied by a detailed map to describe the labyrinthine context that the man happened to live in. How to transform this vertiginous content in literature on one side and through it to investigate the human condition on the other, this is the extreme ambition that, according to “Six memos…” by Calvino, only writers can and should have. This view of literature is peculiar to Italy and to the West after the fifties. We have, on the one hand, a real explosion of knowledge of all the fields at the provision as ever before of a cultural elite, and on the other the Italian masses to educate, to whom to provide a new vision of the world, either from the scientific point of view, or from the point of view of a new and unified national consciousness..