Digital Literary Creative Practice : Six Memos for Writers in the Current Millennium

Using Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium as structure and methodology, this book conjoins literary studies with creative practice to interrogate, extend/subvert, and then reflect on the aesthetic and structural ambitions of multiple innovative print authors.

In 1985 Italo Calvino proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into thenext millennium: lightness, quickness, ‘crystal’ exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, andconsistency. Using Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium as structure andmethodology, this book conjoins literary studies with creative practice to interrogate,extend/subvert, and then reflect on the aesthetic and structural ambitions of multipleinnovative print authors (Italo Calvino, Zadie Smith, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf,Bernardine Evaristo, Roberto Bolaño, Rachel Cusk, Shahriar Mandanipour, W.G. Sebald,Ross Gibson, Arundhati Roy, Han Kang, and J.M. Coetzee) reimagined in new media inorder to develop a model for digital literary practice-led research. This work contains fourstrands that are presented simultaneously. First, this monograph explores the rise of Calvino’svalues within the Calvino corpus. Second, this value’s application to a contemporary literarypredicament is explored through a digression. Third, conclusions from this interrogation aredrawn as relates to digital literary culture. Finally, the value’s importance is demonstratedthrough examining/reflecting on contemporary digital literary creative practice – both theauthor’s own and works created by contemporary writers/artists who have engaged with thedigital postmodern.