Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature) Book PDF, ePub eBook

Join our eBook service for unlimited books & audiobooks. Get a free 7 day subscription! ↓↓↓↓↓


Book Descriptions:

This study recovers Italo Calvino's central place in a lost history of interdisciplinary thought, politics, and literary philosophy in the 1960s. Drawing on his letters, essays, critical reviews, and fiction, as well as a wide range of works--primarily urban planning and design theory and history--circulating among his primary interlocutors, this book takes as its point of departure a sweeping reinterpretation of Invisible Cities. Passages from Calvino's most famous novel routinely appear as aphorisms in calendars, posters, and the popular literature of inspiration and self-help, reducing the novel to vague abstractions and totalizing wisdom about thinking outside the box. The shadow of postmodern studies has had a similarly diminishing effect on this text, rendering up an accomplished but ultimately apolitical novelistic experimentation in endless deconstructive deferrals, the shiny surfaces of play, and the ultimately rigged game of self-referentiality. In contrast, this study draws on an archive of untranslated Italian- and French-language materials on urban planning, architecture, and utopian architecture to argue that Calvino's novel in fact introduces readers to the material history of urban renewal in Italy, France, and the U.S. in the 1960s, as well as the multidisciplinary core of cultural life in that decade: the complex and continuous interplay among novelists and architects, scientists and artists, literary historians and visual studies scholars. His last love poem for the dying city was in fact profoundly engaged, deeply committed to the ethical dimensions of both architecture and lived experience in the spaces of modernity as well as the resistant practices of reading and utopian imagining that his urban studies in turn inspired.

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature) by Letizia Modena

From reader reviews:

Tracey Egan:

What do you concentrate on book? It is just for students because they are still students or the idea for all people in the world, what best subject for that? Merely you can be answered for that question above. Every person has different personality and hobby for each other. Don't to be compelled someone or something that they don't would like do that. You must know how great in addition to important the book Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature). All type of book is it possible to see on many solutions. You can look for the internet resources or other social media.

Anna Wright:

What do you concerning book? It is not important along with you? Or just adding material if you want something to explain what the one you have problem? How about your spare time? Or are you busy man or woman? If you don't have spare time to perform others business, it is give you a sense of feeling bored faster. And you have free time? What did you do? Every individual has many questions above. The doctor has to answer that question because just their can do which. It said that about e-book. Book is familiar on every person. Yes, it is appropriate. Because start from on pre-school until university need this particular Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature) to read.

Cheryl Estrella:

Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature) can be one of your nice books that are good idea. We recommend that straight away because this reserve has good vocabulary that could increase your knowledge in vocab, easy to understand, bit entertaining however delivering the information. The writer giving his/her effort to place every word into enjoyment arrangement in writing Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature) yet doesn't forget the main level, giving the reader the hottest and also based confirm resource data that maybe you can be one of it. This great information can drawn you into new stage of crucial imagining.

Carlton Little:

Don't be worry if you are afraid that this book will probably filled the space in your house, you may have it in e-book method, more simple and reachable. This specific Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature) can give you a lot of close friends because by you taking a look at this one book you have point that they don't and make you actually more like an interesting person. This book can be one of a step for you to get success. This publication offer you information that maybe your friend doesn't realize, by knowing more than some other make you to be great folks. So , why hesitate? We need to have Italo Calvino's Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in An Age of Urban Crisis (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature).