The Activist and Calvino

This English class seems to be coinciding perfectly with my creative writing class as in today’s class we were discussing Italo Calvino and his work with constraint based writing. When I saw the title of Calvino’s excerpt, I was expecting a different, more politically aggressive tone to his writing. However, in “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature”, Calvino addresses the fact that he tends to place literature and politics in completely separate categories. While I am able to acknowledge social commentary in literature when I see it, I generally tend to think of literature as being simply literary and politics and political and the two to not be completely intertwined. Something Calvino said that really struck me was “Politics, like literature, must above all know itself and distrust itself” (100). In order to progress, we must know and understand our flaws in both literature and politics. Innovation only happens when we understand what is impeding growth.