Transmedial Resonance

The Acoustic Afterlives of Italo Calvino

Introduces a new way of understanding influence, reception, and adaptation via the work of Italy’s most famous modern writer

In Transmedial Resonance, Robert A. Rushing addresses the remarkable and ongoing responses to the imagination of Italo Calvino, Italy’s most important modern writer. Since his death in 1985, Calvino’s writing has served as a constant figure of inspiration for other artists, and tellingly, that inspiration has been "more outside than inside." Although Calvino’s reputation as a writer is immense, his influence has in fact been vastly larger outside of literature, including in architecture, city plan­ning, community organizing, design, visual arts, video games, the performing arts, and much more. That influence is not only transmedial. It has also been "more outside than inside" across national boundaries, particularly in the English-speaking world.

Rushing thinks about Calvino’s influence through the metaphor of resonance. When something resonates, he argues, it may be "inspired" to do so, but it does so in its own voice, singing its own song. In fact, resonance offers an entirely different way of thinking about influence and artistic reception, stressing the energy of the inspiration rather than fidelity to the original. In keeping with that underlying sonic metaphor, Rushing looks at specifically acoustic responses to Calvino. They include Chris Cerrone’s Pulitzer-nominated "opera in headphones" based on Invisible Cities, Lisa Mezzacappa’s Cosmicomics jazz suite, and Ashwini Ramaswamy’s multimedia dance performance of Invisible Cities, which combines traditional South Indian Bharatanatyam, urban breaking, and African American modern dance. These works, Rushing shows, tell the story of a very different Calvino, one who is (in Mezzacappa’s words) "nerdy and neurotic," playfully perverse, and profoundly political.

Bringing together sound studies with literary studies and cultural reception, Transmedial Reso­nance argues for a radical re-imagination of how we think about artistic and cultural influence, calling for a completely new understanding of this major figure of modern Italian and world literature.

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