Italo Calvino uses a few rhetorical devices in his essay. One main device he used is parallelism. Parallelism is defined as "Several parts of a sentence or several sentences are expressed similarly to show that the ideas in the parts or sentences are equal in importance. Parallelism also adds balance and rhythm and, most importantly, clarity to the sentence." (Harris 2) Calvino repeats himself many times in this essay to make it clearer and to stress the importance. An example is when Calvino says, "A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading." (Calvino 5) I also thought that a similar point was another point of his. "A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers. (Calvino 5)
Calvino also uses the opposite of parallelism, which is chiasmus. An example of this is in another one of Calvino's points. "A classic is a work whcih relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without." (Calvino 8) But then he says, "A classic is a work which persists as background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway." What I understood from this is that he says a classic mutes background noise, yet at the same time, is background noise.
Calvino, Italo. Why Read the Classics? London: Vintage, 2000. Print.
Harris, Robert. "A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices." VirtualSalt. 5 Jan. 2010. Web. 20 Aug. 2011. http://virtualsalt.com/rhetoric2.
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