Mnemosyne, Supplements Italo Calvino and Classics

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.