O polígrafo e as ondas

Abstract

As a literary form, the essay is widely heterogeneous and this characteristic is principally due to the irregular behaviour of the essayist, "a visionary of thought and dialectic of metaphor", who makes an essay "a genre of mixture and contamination", as the Italian critic Alfonso Berardinelli has stated. On analysis of the non-fictional work of Italo Calvino, one can see how diverse the author's texts are. This is not only through the variety of content, inevitable in essays, but also through the wide variety of forms and the discoursive structure of the texts, which shows Calvino's patent understanding of the enlightening nature and linguistic inventiveness of the essay.