De Lauretis, who wrote extensively and admiringly about Calvino, reads If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler through multiple critical lenses. Although her essay is not particularly long, we can find in it evidence of Postmodern theory (Hal Foster and Ihab Hassan, who incidentally was my own mentor), Psychoanalytic criticism (Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan), Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida), Feminist criticism, and even some early Queer Theory. I recognize that you probably have little to no experience with these modes of critical thought, so here is an opportunity to follow the procedure I have suggested: reading with and reading against. Find two passages in the essay, one that you find illuminating or intriguing or persuasive and one that you resist and to which you want to raise an objection, and write in response to both.
Re’s essay serves both as a history of Calvino’s thought over the decades (including his conflicts with other Italian intellectuals) and his enduring and profound concern with literature’s place in the contemporary world. Ultimately, we see Calvino attempting to defend the belief that literature not only has value, but that that value — or at least capacity for value — is unique to literature. I presume all of you are readers, that you find literature (broadly defined) as worth your time, money, and mental effort. Yet surely you know people — perhaps friends, perhaps family, certainly peers — who do not share that opinion. How persuasive do you find Calvino’s claims for literature’s value? Do any seem unconvincing to you? Can you think of any argument for it that Calvino does not make?
I have called the Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sections of Invisible Cities a framing narrative, pointed out the A1, A2 B1, A3 B2 C1 (and so on) structure as important, and said that Marco Polo represents Calvino (the author) and the Khan represents us (the reader). However, Breiner challenges these all of these assertions, arguing that this frame is not really a frame, the structure is more or less of a red herring, and that Polo also is a type of reader. How does his essay alter your understanding of the book? Where, if anywhere, do you find his argument less than convincing?
Sorapure suggests that one of the central themes of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is misreading, and that the main character represents traditional modes of literary analysis. Consider the book from that perspective, and how Calvino’s emphasis on multiplicity — which Sorapure notes, even though Six Memos for the Nest Millennium had not been published at the time she wrote this essay — defeats that traditionally hermeneutic approach to interpretation.