ITALIAN CULTURAL INSTITUTE MELBOURNE
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RISM
(Research in Italian Studies, Melbourne)
The Italian Cultural Institute Melbourne
take pleasure in inviting you to a talk in English on
Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco
and the transforming power of words
with
Professor Martin McLaughlin from Oxford University (UK)
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(The talk is in English)
Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco wrote many essays on world literature, so much so that they would both have been major literary critics even if they had not written any novels. Both authors were also influenced by many non-Italian writers in their creative works. However, the way they interpreted and were inspired by texts from other literatures was different.
This seminar seeks to compare these two major Italian writers in terms of both their criticism of world literature and the different ways their fiction was transformed by it. What emerges is Eco's privileging of medieval texts as opposed to Calvino's love for Ariosto, and in the modern era their differing reactions to major figures such as Joyce and Borges. What they have in common is their capacity to draw creative inspiration even from texts that are very remote from the poetics of these two contemporary writers.
Professor Martin McLaughlin is Fiat-Serena Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Oxford and Fellow of Magdalen College. McLaughlin is the author of Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance (OUP, 1995), a monograph on Italo Calvino (Edinburgh UP, 1998), and has co-edited a number of volumes.
He has translated Italo Calvino's Why Read the Classics? (Cape, 1999), Hermit in Paris (Cape, 2003), and Into the War (Penguin, 2011), Umberto Eco's On Literature (Secker & Warburg, 2005), and co-translated and edited Calvino's The Complete Cosmicomics (Penguin, 2009).
Light refreshments.Free admission
Bookings essential for catering purposes: bookings.iicmelbourne@esteri.it
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