Abstract

In the nineteenth century, Johann von Goethe anticipated the unification of our planet. In his journal "Kunst und Altertum" (Art and Antiquity) in 1828, Goethe hoped for increased cultural understanding resulting from the revolution in communication and print media during his own time. He saw the signs of a universal world literature in the process of being constituted. In the context of the literature of the world, Goethe argued that a national literature is a rather unmeaning term. The focus of a world literature is not to encourage nations to think alike, but that they grow to understand and tolerate one another and "through their own inclinations ... find the motive for corporate action." The study of world literature, with all its perplexities and fascinations, is essential in a global world today. Taking my cue from Goethe and contemporary writers on this subject (for example, David Damrosch), I propose to explore one of the values of world literature based on a reading of Italo Calvino's “Six Memos for the Next Millennium", in which Calvino identifies universal values of literature in a series of lectures offered as memos for the 21st century. For example, in the first lecture Calvino finds an auspicious image for our time in the agility of the writer who searches for "lightness as a reaction to the weight of living." Lightness as a kind of "weightless gravity" allows for flight into another world, another culture, another level of perception. I propose to consider Calvino's value of lightness in terms of the network of world literature.