Memos

In his novel, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino identifies five aesthetic qualities inherent in literature: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.  In his five memos, each one devoted to one of these qualities, Calvino identifies objective properties that help explain how a literary work of art functions.  Consistent with Calvino’s form, I will introduce the quality as Calvino defined it, select a work of E-Lit that exemplifies the quality, name a graphic element in which the quality can be found, and choose an analogy and emblem that help explain my own sensibilities in relation to the quality.