Zugl.: Halle (Saale), Univ., Diss., 2004

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-68) Also available in print.

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In 1972, Italo Calvino published Le citta invisibili, a text which marked a radical departure from "traditional" narrative methods. / This study is an analysis of the literary techniques used in the text. It posits Calvino's critical and theoretical evolution as the source of the specific stylistic choices that determine the originality of the work.

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Thesis (doctoral)--Zürich. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 176-182).

1. Sweetness and Light. A novel. Judi lives in a nice, clean house with her seventeen year old stepson, who won’t talk to her in anything but monosyllables. His father, Nelson, and she are struggling to relate to each other, since they fell out over Judi’s continued desire to have a baby, despite many miscarriages. She’s forty-one. Her relationship has lost its spark, she doesn’t know how to talk to the man that she lives with anymore. To make matters worse, he is her boss too. Judi needs answers, what she discovers instead is The Secret, Rhonda Byrne’s internationally bestselling guide to shaping the world around you with the power of your mind. Judi soon discovers she’s pretty good at it. Uncanny things start to happen. A wine-do with literary pretentions leads to an unexpectedly spiritual interlude, during which Judi is led, by a cosmic vision, to discover the sinister happenings at her work place. Hope, a schizophrenic woman in their care, has been raped, and is pregnant. Worse, Judi has strong reason to suspect that her abuser is the man she has shared her life with. With The Secret as her moral compass, Judi decides to kidnap Hope and raise the baby as her own. The relationship on the brink, becomes a game of brinkmanship. As Judi struggles to build a dream-life from the wreckage of the old, the burden of past makes its weight felt. A novel of secrets, and The Secret. An exploration of cosmic ordering, and its consequences. 2. Making Light Of The Holocaust: Modelling Calvino’s concept of lightness as an appropriate literary response to the Shoah in Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. In Six Memos For The New Millenium, Italo Calvio proposes that lightness is a literary value which can act against cultural and creative paralysis. Given the ongoing cultural obligation to bear witness to the events of The Holocaust, might lightness be a necessary approach to post-holocaust literature? Calvino’s concept of lightness is deconstructed and examined in relation to the Memorial to The Murdered Jews Of Europe. The understandable critical hesitancy surrounding a light approach to the atrocities is examined, with special reference to Benigni’s La vita è bella Finally, taking Anne Michaels’ novel Fugitive Pieces as an exemplar of the lightness Calvino advocated at work in the field of holocaust literature, the case is made for the appropriateness, and potential necessity, of this approach in works that address The Holocaust, in the specific context of Michaels’ work and more generally.

The thesis links the writings of the Italian Italo Calvino and the Chinese Ma Yuan through the Taoist symbol of the Tao and the Borgesian concept of the Aleph, an imaginary point in space containing all points in space and time. Based on Zhuangzi’s parable of the Emperor Hun-tun (Chaos) who lost his original state of chaos when he had sensory openings poked into him, the vision of the Aleph/Tao represents the return to that chaotic state of undifferentiated knowledge one experiences when one closes all sensory perceptions. This unnameable vision allows one to transcend all apparent conceptual dichotomies as it lies in the realm of intuition rather than language. Calvino, like Borges, posits that the chaos of the universe cannot be represented through the sequential language system, but nevertheless demonstrates this ineffability through language. Ma Yuan celebrates the chaos of life by writing about a mythological Tibet, upholding the uniqueness of that culture as a subtle subversion to the Chinese political and territorial takeover. Chapter One and Two, respectively, discuss the “Overlapping Conceptual Spaces” in Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Ma Yuan’s ‘The Temptation of the Gangdisi’. Chapter Three looks in greater detail at the images of the Aleph and the Tao in the two main texts against the backdrop of Borgesian thought. In accordance with the concept of the Aleph/Tao whose definition is continuously unsettled by contradictory conjectures, the fourth chapter undoes the conclusions reached in the previous chapters. This chapter discusses Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Ma Yuan’s shorter Tibetan stories in the light of comic parody. That which was earlier posited as the ineffable in these stories is elaborated in a profusion of words. The Conclusion discusses from a Taoist point of view the predominantly male voice in the writings of the two authors. While both advocate the spiritual sameness of all phenomena in an undifferentiated knowledge of the world, they nevertheless write from the male perspective of the yang pursuing and wanting to possess the yin.

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This thesis offers an interpretative framework of Italo Calvino’s later work (the cosmicomic stories, Le città invisibili, and Palomar), based on the notions of myth, desire, utopia and science. Its aim is to suggest a reading of these texts as a common literary project best described as being deeply influenced by mythological elements and structures, while clearly bearing the mark of enlightened thought. The study exposes both the intellectual implications of such a project, and the aesthetic mechanisms by which it takes its form. The research was informed by Calvino’s own relevant critical work, a network of secondary criticism approaching either the texts which were of interest to this particular work or the themes and notions that were to be explored, and a set of tertiary texts, which helped to consolidate pivotal notions. The latter include the work of thinkers who had a major influence on Calvino as it is known from his essays and his letters (like Charles Fourier or Giorgio de Santillana), but also other figures, such as Anton Chekhov or Albert Camus, who emerged as interesting comparative opportunities for our study. The analysis of the cosmicomic stories explores the relationship between myth-making and individual responsibility. It draws parallels between intellectual commitment and literary projection, and defines Calvino’s utopian project, including it in a reflection on knowledge, myth and the tyranny of abstract thought. Individual responsibility emerges as a prospective and a retrospective activity, which is explained alongside the idea of ‘poetics in the making’. Le città invisibili is studied as an illustration of Calvino’s precise poetics using the image of the city. The notions of the episode and the frame are the central concepts around which the inquiry is articulated. Discussing the ideas of desire and the search for the ideal, it is possible to draw solid links with the cosmological project of the cosmicomics and Calvino’s idea of utopia and myth. With an examination of characterisation in Palomar and a close analysis of the quest for meaning, this thesis also attempts a definition of Calvino’s aesthetics as the ‘aesthetics of earthly transcendence’. It moves on to a comparative study of Palomar and Le Mythe de Sisyphe by Albert Camus, in order to suggest an interpretation of the main character, as a man who lives and observes his life in the face of the absurd; the literary consequence being the immediate confrontation between writing and death, and the presence of silence threatening understanding and communication.