Calvinist’ Exercises in Educational Theory: Introduction

the Italian novelist Italo Calvino performed a highly curious gesture.Instead of confining himself to addressing either specific aspects of his own literary work or established categories and concepts of literary theory, he chose to identify and discuss six (seemingly idiosyncratic) "literary qualities or values" which he believed would prove especially relevant in view of the imminent third millennium and its potential challenges.Accordingly, his Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1993), as the English translation of his Lezione americane would be titled, contains lectures on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity-with the sixth lecture, on consistency, having been left unwritten due to Calvino's untimely death (in 1985).Whereas Calvino, with his superb mastery of world literature and the exquisite interpretive skills displayed in his analyses, in the first place explicitly elaborated these qualities as literary ones, both the memos' Wirkungsgeschichte and various intratextual cues hint at a potential significance extending far beyond the literary realm, in remarkably divergent discourses and domains (e.g., Lolli 2011; for the case of mathematics).The wide-ranging scope of the six qualities comes as no surprise, if we take into account, on the one hand, Calvino's understanding of literature as a broadly cognitive (and not merely aesthetic) adventure, and, on the other, his characteristic ambition (and ability) to bridge the gap between literature and science, and to interweave the ideas of these "two cultures".Indeed, in his view, "[s]cientific and poetic attitudes coincide: both are attitudes at the same time of inquiry and planning, of discovery and invention" (Calvino 1993, 108).In their own way, the lectures may thus be seen to articulate a constructive, interdisciplinary answer to what more recently others, like Bruno Latour, have termed, following Whitehead, the "bifurcation of nature"-the problematic modern divide between social and natural sciences, culture and nature, human and non-human agencies (cf.Latour 2008).