Creative Writing Commons^™

Toward Salvation: Italo Calvino’S Wakeful Phenomenology, May C. Peckham

Senior Honors Projects

“Lightness.” The word remains inescapable when attending to the mysterious work of Italo Calvino. It appears elusively in the texts of his novels and acts as a catalyst to many of his critical endeavors. Calvino addresses most explicitly this concept of lightness in his collection of lectures entitled Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Although these lectures were never delivered, they exist as a testament to the idea that “the boundless universe of literature” contains “new avenues to be explored, both very recent and very ancient, styles and forms that can change our image of the world” (Six Memos 7-8). …