![]() ![]() #ITALO CALVINO IL CAVALIERE INESISTENTE PDF FULL#At the very end of the novel, Calvino presents the apparent situation of a benevolent offer of reassurance to his readership – an offer which ostensibly could only be made if the writer were in full control of readers’ motivations, their desire and anticipation for the text. The conventions of romance and detective story structure the metafictional plot they are the main themes that seduce readers to follow the quest of the two protagonists: the unnamed “Reader” searches for the book that he wants to finish reading, which soon overlaps with his search for the attractive “Other Reader,” Ludmilla. Both characters contain elements of writers’ desire to exercise complete control over their creations as well as writers’ anxiety when faced with readers’ expectations.Ĭalvino is as fascinated by the process of storytelling as by the story itself and the novel is a triumphant vindication of the power of storytelling to negotiate `reality'. The novel’s ostensibly postmodern technique to allude to its own fictionality creates uncertainty about the role of the author when Calvino refers to himself throughout the novel and constructs multiple reflections of himself in the novel: The self-torturing fictional novelist Silas Flannery is preoccupied with writing the one true book that would eclipse all other books the devious translator Ermes Marana creates works of pastiche, books confusing and false, in which each story would merely serve to lead into the next. As a writer of fiction whose fiction is clearly about the writing of fiction, Calvino uses game-playing within the aegis of meta-fiction to demonstrate writers’ ability to exercise control by destabilizing text and confusing readers. The ability of a writer to seduce and manipulate readers through a tightly controlled narrative strategy is examined to assess the extent of a reader’s autonomy. Extremist attitudes regarding the production and consumption of books form the basis of an exploration of the general suggestion that there has been a reduction in the authority of the literary author. By use of juxtaposition, Calvino ironically explores extreme opposing positions in the spectrum of reading and different groups of readers’ expectations toward texts. The plot is driven by the meditation on the nature of reading as much as on the nature of writing. įollowing the postmodern transformation of an "authorial self" into a "textual self", the novel explores the relationships between readers, writers, their books and the ideas they engender, however ludicrous or possessive those ideas might play out. ![]() Considering the importance of the role of the reader in the interpretation of a text that constitutes meaning, it seems that Calvino deliberately adopts the position of a decentred authorial role under the post-structuralist premise that his influence has been reduced to that of a ‘scriptor’. By putting the case for each side, Calvino implicitly questions who is ‘master’ and who is ‘slave’ in the production and consumption of texts. One argument for reading Calvino’s novel in this manner is still prevalent: embedded in a novelty form of fictional arrangement, the book is preoccupied with the metaphysical struggle for dominance between supposedly antagonistic forces: readers and writers literature and literary industry. If texts are said to have no inherent meaning, there follows the extreme conclusion that any text can mean anything, depending on the manner in which it is read. At that time, postmodern theory stressed the role of the reader and critics assumed that reading creates meaning from the text, independent from writerly intention. The following essay follows up on her insights and proposes that within the novel is buried a stringent critique of postmodern theories, especially deconstructionism, that dominated literary discourse in the nineteen-seventies. Focussing on how framing devices affect the reading of the novel as a whole, Salvatori poses pertinent questions about readers’ autonomy. In a close reading of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1981), Mariolina Salvatori examines how Calvino’s meditation on writer's authority versus reader's autonomy – understood as a battle between production and consumption of text or, in common parlance, the experience and difficulties of writing a novel opposite reading one – influences our understanding of the text. Power of Literature versus Poverty of Language Textual Play: Reflections on Literature and Language Narrative Strategy: Desire and Frustration of Readers’ Expectations Praise for the ‘natural’ Reader/Criticism of Academic Reading ![]()
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