Redemption and Narrative: Refiguration of Time in Postmodern Literature
Chapter
Abstract
In Six Memos for the Next Millennium,1 Italo Calvino discusses the qualities of literature that merit becoming part of the legacy for the future. He identifies multiplicity as one of the most significant and valuable dimensions of writing. Present in ‘hyper-novels’ such as his own If on a winter’s night a traveler, as well as in the works of writers such as Borges and Perec, multiplicity allows the writer ‘to unite density of invention and expression with a sense of infinite possibilities’.2 As ‘a network of possibilities’, multiplicity sustains the ambiguities Calvino locates at the heart of other qualities he considers praiseworthy.
Keywords
Interpretative Strategy Fictive World European Literature Narrative Process Prophetic Voice
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Bibliography
- 1.Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 120–22.Google Scholar
- 2.Milan Kundera, ‘Dialogue on the Art of Composition’, in The Art of the Novel, English translation Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1987), p. 42.Google Scholar
- 3.Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, English translation Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1954), p. 113.Google Scholar
- 4.This part of the present paper is a substantively rewritten version of part of ‘Religious Imagination and Postmodern Narrative’, a paper presented at the Arts and Religion Section of the College Theology Society in May, 1988.Google Scholar
- 5.Ihab Hassan, ‘Toward a Concept of Postmodernism’, in The Postmodern Turn (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University, 1987), pp. 84–98.Google Scholar
- 6.Brian McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York and London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 3–11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 7.Kundera, ‘The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes’, in The Art of the Novel, English translation Linda Asher (New York: Grove Press, 1987), p. 17.Google Scholar
- 8.Hal Foster (ed.), ‘Introduction’, in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983), p. xii.Google Scholar
- 9.McHale, Postmodernist Fiction, p. 6.Google Scholar
Copyright information
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 1990