About Calvino

Something else I really should have included in my dissertation (a continuing, possibly never-ending series). This is from Why Read the Classics? by Italo Calvino:

If I read The Odyssey, I read Homer’s text but I cannot forget all the things that Ulysses’ adventures have come to mean in the course of the centuries, and I cannot help wondering whether these meanings were implicit in the original text or if they are later accretions, deformations or expansions of it. If I read Kafka, I fid myself approving or rejecting the legitimacy of the adjective ‘Kafkaesque’ which we hear constantly being used to refer to just about anything.

Good points, but Calvino is reflecting on his own experience and, implicitly, that of his own socio-cultural circle. Who is the “we” that hears the word “Kafkaesque” at all, let alone constantly? What is your experience of The Odyssey if you don’t know what an odyssey is?