Digital Literary Creative Practice

In 1985 Italo Calvino proposed six values he deemed crucial to literature as it moved into the
next millennium: lightness, quickness, ‘crystal’ exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and
consistency. 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 (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 in
order to develop a model for digital literary practice-led research. This work contains four
strands that are presented simultaneously. First, this monograph explores the rise of Calvino’s
values within the Calvino corpus. Second, this value’s application to a contemporary literary
predicament is explored through a digression. Third, conclusions from this interrogation are
drawn as relates to digital literary culture. Finally, the value’s importance is demonstrated
through examining/reflecting on contemporary digital literary creative practice – both the
author’s own and works created by contemporary writers/artists who have engaged with the
digital postmodern.