Author Topic: Why Read the Classics?  (Read 955 times)

hubag bohol

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hubag bohol

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Re: Why Read the Classics?
« Reply #1 on: July 08, 2012, 07:58:32 AM »
Product Details

    Paperback: 288 pages
    Publisher: Penguin Books (May 2009)
    Language: English
    ISBN-10: 0141189703
    ISBN-13: 978-0141189703
    Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 7.8 inches

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hubag bohol

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Re: Why Read the Classics?
« Reply #2 on: July 08, 2012, 07:59:58 AM »
Why read Italo Calvino's book on the classics? Because it passes his own test for what a classic is, and its brisk prose can blast your concept of the word clean of the dusty associations that cling to it. Calvino gives 14 offbeat definitions of classic, my favorite being "a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off." His sharp essays on Conrad, Dickens, Diderot, Flaubert, Ovid, and others constitute an act of self-criticism too, a novelist's imaginative autobiography. In 1955, when rave-reviewing Robinson Crusoe, he called Daniel Defoe the "inventor of modern journalism." In 1954, he overcame his disgust with Hemingway's life "of violent tourism," coolly assessed his dry heights and sodden depths, and called himself Papa's apprentice. And the 1984 piece on Borges shows who influenced Calvino most once he'd become a master himself. --Amazon.com Review

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hubag bohol

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Re: Why Read the Classics?
« Reply #3 on: July 08, 2012, 08:05:07 AM »
Italo Calvino’s 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic


        The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: 'I'm rereading…', never 'I'm reading….'

        The classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

        The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual's or the collective unconscious.

        A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

        A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.

        A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.

        The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.

        A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.

        Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

        A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

        'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.

        A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.

        A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.

        A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

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