Calvino used many rhetorical devices in his essay. The great part is though, these touches made the essay more colorful and understandable. You barely have to read but several paragraphs before you start to notice some of these devices. On the very first page a couple paragraphs down you can see the allusions he uses. He refers to Honore de Balzac, a French writer, Herodotus and Thucydides, two ancient Greek historians, Saint-Simon, an early French socialist theorist, and Cardinal Retz, another French writer (Calvino pg 3). He continues to mention other people as the essay goes on. I also found a metaphor that he used in this essay. He says this, “But it is already an achievement for most people to hear the classics as a distant echo, outside the room which is pervaded by the present as if it were a television set on full volume.”(Calvino pg 8 par2) Here he’s talking about how classics take you out of reality because your reading something that was written back in the past. He compares the present to being so loud like a TV turned up all the way, and that one is lucky if you can even hear the echo of the classics.
Calvino, Italo. "Why Read the Classics?" Why Read the Classics? New York: Vintage, 2000. 3-9. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment