Italo Calvino's 14 Definitions of What Makes a Classic — brainpickings.org

“A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.” A reader recently wrote me to lightly criticize the fact that I called George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four “cult-classics,” suggesting that they instead merit the inferior term “required reading.” So what, exactly, is a classic, and why should we care? Richard J. Smith, in discussing the iconic ancient Chinese Book of Changes, offered a four-point checklist definition and Simon Crtichley showed us how to read them. But perhaps the most essential question is why the classics should be read. That’s exactly what beloved Italian writer Italo Calvino addresses in his 1991 book Why Read the Classics? (public library) — a sort of “classic” in its own right. In this collection of essays on classical literature, Calvino also produces these 14 definitions of a “classic”:

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