Article Instance

HTTP 200 OK
Allow: GET
Content-Type: application/json
Vary: Accept

{
    "pk": 40925,
    "title": "A Jazz Cosmicomics: Geometry, Perversion, Resonance",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Italo Calvino has a widely recognized and significant position in Italian literature and culture as one of the masters of twentieth-century Italian letters, recognized for his intensely visual imagination and geometric formalism. This position, however, might actually \nunderstate\n Calvino’s significance, because his influence has been at least as significant outside of Italy as inside, and larger outside of literature than inside (\nInvisible Cities\n, in particular, has had an enormous influence in art, architecture, urban planning, design, and even social services offered in urban spaces). A useful model for thinking about transcultural and transmedial influence might be the notion of \nresonance\n, in which a sound (Calvino’s writing in this case) reverberates in an increasingly large and complex cultural space — such a model might be particularly attractive when it comes to Calvino, since it has the potential to reframe the attention to the visual and the geometric. This article looks to one particular example of this cultural resonance: Lisa Mezzacappa’s 2020 jazz suite of Calvino’s \nCosmicomics\n. Jazz might seem like an unusual way of conceptualizing Calvino, but in \nUn ottimista in America\n, Calvino himself suggested that jazz has a particular and positive capacity to think through cultural dilemmas without “crystallizing” into a static and unproductive image (a point he would also make in one of his cosmicomic stories, tellingly entitled “I cristalli”). Indeed, jazz allows us a different way to hear Calvino: playful, improvisational, and sensual. Looking primarily at one track from Mezzacappa’s suite, “The Form of Space,” I contend that her adaptation encourages us to hear Calvino story as a critique of the purely cerebral, visual and geometric; the music instead gestures toward a subject who is neurotic, perverse and unpredictable. The improvisational nature of jazz and the Lucretian geometry of spacetime both suggest that the supposedly rational and composed subject might swerve out of the predictable straight line into surprising new territory that is boisterous, risky and remarkably open.",
    "language": "en",
    "license": {
        "name": "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial  4.0",
        "short_name": "CC BY-NC 4.0",
        "text": "Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.\n\nNonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.\n\nNo additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.",
        "url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0"
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Calvino, Mezzacappa, jazz, Cosmicomics, resonance, influence"
        }
    ],
    "section": "III. Interdisciplinary Approaches and Dialogues",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/32f5x484",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Robert",
            "middle_name": "Allen",
            "last_name": "Rushing",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Professor of Italian, Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies, University of California, Los Angeles.",
            "department": "None"
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": "2023-01-30T14:24:54-05:00",
    "date_accepted": "2023-01-30T14:24:54-05:00",
    "date_published": "2023-10-11T12:37:00-04:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cisj/article/40925/galley/30637/download/"
        }
    ]
}