Italo Calvino and Classics

Lightness – Quickness – Multiplicity

Lisa Cordes, Marco Formisano, Janja Soldo Blaney (Herausgeber)

Buch | Hardcover

376 Seiten

2025
Brill (Verlag)
978-90-04-71508-0 (ISBN)

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This book applies three of the literary qualities sketched by Italo Calvino in his Memos for the Next Millennium – lightness, quickness, multiplicity – to a wide variety of ancient texts, presenting innovative and creative readings of well-known and lesser-known writings.

In his Memos for the Next Millennium, the Italian writer Italo Calvino identified five literary qualities that should accompany writers and readers into the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. Though never finished, the Memos continue to inspire readers and scholars.
This volume turns three of Calvino’s poetic qualities – lightness, quickness, multiplicity – into powerful hermeneutic strategies for reading ancient and late antique texts, ranging widely from Homer’s Iliad to Claudian’s carmina minora. It is the first book to read ancient literature through the lens of Calvino’s Memos, thus fostering a new discussion of the interactions between modern and ancient texts as well as between methodologies.

Lisa Cordes is Professor of Latin Language and Literature at Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on Neronian and Flavian literature, panegyric rhetoric, gender studies in antiquity and ancient concepts of fiction, authorship and the literary character. Marco Formisano is Professor of Latin literature at Ghent University. He has published extensively on late antique literature, early Christian martyr acts, ancient technical and scientific texts, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is the editor of the series “sera tela. Studies in Late Antique Literature and its Reception” (Bloomsbury, London). Janja Soldo is Lecturer in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Seneca Epistulae Morales Book 2. A Commentary with Text, Translation & Introduction (OUP 2021) and has published a co-edited volume and articles on ancient epistolography. Contributors are: Kathleen M. Coleman, Lisa Cordes, Jacqueline Fabre-Serris, Sabine Föllinger, Marco Formisano, Therese Fuhrer, Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer, Stephen Harrison, Martin Hose, Christoph Markschies, Gernot Michael Müller, Paolo Felice Sacci, Renate Schlesier, Janja Soldo, Jan R. Stenger, Tobias Uhle, Antje Wessels, Christopher Whitton.

Preface

Introduction

Part1 Lightness

1 Bakchylides’ Poetik der Leichtigkeit in Epinikion 5

JanR. Stenger

2 Trauer, Schmerz und dichterische Form

Literatur als Existenzbewältigung nach Italo Calvino

Sabine Föllinger

3 Calvino’s Perseus

Strategies of Narrated Lightness in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Therese Fuhrer

4 Lizenz zum Schreiben

Leichtigkeit und Schwere in Ovids Tristia

Antje Wessels

5 Horace and Ovid

Two Ways of Thinking about the leuitas of Love?

Jacqueline Fabre-Serris

6 Light Weight

Pliny (with Tacitus) on Master-Murder (Ep. 3.14)

Christopher Whitton

Part2 Quickness

7 Geschwindigkeit als analytisches Problem

Euripides’ Orestes als Testfall für eine Untersuchung literarischer ‚rapidità‘

Martin Hose

8 Der Abgesang auf die Bukolik in Vergils neunter Ecloge

Tobias Uhle

9 Schnelles und leichtes Ende in Senecas Consolatio ad Helviam

Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer

10 Pliny’s Shortest Letters

KathleenM. Coleman

11 Beschleunigung in vormodernen Zeiten?

Literarische Gestaltung von Beschleunigung in antiken christlichen Texten

Christoph Markschies

Part3 Multiplicity

12 Anakreons multiple Lesbierin

Eine spielerische Hommage an Sappho

Renate Schlesier

13 Der Satiriker und sein Vater

Satirische Poetik und mos maiorum im Licht von Italo Calvinos Memos for the Next Millennium

Gernot Michael Müller

14 Vergil and Sibylline Prophecy

Generic Multiplicity in the Aeneid

Stephen Harrison

15 Unendliche Möglichkeiten

Calvinos molteplicità und die Controversiae des Älteren Seneca

Lisa Cordes

16 Multiplicity in Ancient Epistolography

Italo Calvino and Fronto Ad Antoninum Imperatorem 1.35 and Ad M.Caesarem et invicem 2.2 and 2.8

Janja Soldo

17 Diffracting Flatness

Multiplicity and Materiality in Claudian’s Carmina minora

Paolo Felice Sacchi

18 “Un livre sur rien”

Multiplicity, Indeterminacy, and Interpretation in the De rosis nascentibus

Marco Formisano

Index

Erscheinungsdatum	20.02.2025
Reihe/Serie	Mnemosyne, Supplements ; 488
Verlagsort	Leiden
Sprache	englisch; deutsch
Maße	155 x 235 mm
Gewicht	752 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	90-04-71508-8 / 9004715088
ISBN-13	978-90-04-71508-0 / 9789004715080
Zustand	Neuware