Twenty-second International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Perhaps one of the most anticipated moments in postmodern literary theory was the publication and further implementation of Italo Calvino’s Lezioni americane. Considering their intrinsic value to literary interpretation, Six Memos for the Classroom attempts to place Calvino’s theories of this millennium’s writing technique within the scope of collegiate composition education. It is difficult to consider current composition pedagogy as not being fraught with heaviness– what American scholarship determines to be the Post-Process school of thought, is soaked by the weight of layered theory. After taking from literary thought, as so many previous composition theory studies have, there exists the possibility of teaching college composition through the lens of Calvino’s Six Memos. Using not only Calvino as a primary text, but additional theory from bell hooks and her contemporaries– the idea of what a college classroom looks, sounds and writes like can be uniquely altered to welcome a lightness that is contrary to most overly-saturated writing in globalized academia. We have spent the last two decades scouring the arguments, individual teaching, and our pedagogies at hand for an answer to the liberatory void left by early 2000’s Process theory, the answer lies in Calvino. In a college classroom that is anything but localized, it is lightness, quickness, exactitude and the like that bridge the rhetorical, linguistic gap between students and their world. In doing so, we prove Calvino correct, but we also reinvent the ways we teach, perform and think of what it means to write at the postgraduate level.