Topographies of sand: The narrative of Georges Perec and Italo Calvino.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Botta, Anna.

Contributor:

Prince, Gerald, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Romance-language literature.

Literature, Modern.

Comparative literature.

0295.

0298.

0313.

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

0295.

0298.

0313.

Physical Description:

240 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 52-11A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

In La condition postmoderne, Jean-Francois Lyotard explains how science has shifted from a representational to a non-representational epistemology without losing cognitive value: the purpose of a scientific work is no longer to produce an adequate model of some exterior referent, but rather to generate new "moves" that may destabilize knowledge, but also promote new ideas. The purpose of this dissertation is to map "the postmodern condition" in the fictional works of two writers, Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, who consistently produced open systems similar to the "antimodels" which Lyotard argues have been made available by the new scientific epistemology. Their texts are examined as explorations of logical possibilities consequent to new spatial orderings. They make manifest cultural modes of ordering and imply that our perceptual grids, like the worlds which they construe, are culturally contingent.

My analysis shows how Calvino and Perec organize their narrative works either as combinatory structures restlessly pursuing unrealized possibilities or as rigid grids suddenly subverted by the injection of the aleatory (the Lucretian device of the "clinamen" is an epistemological tool integral to their literary systems). Whenever attempting to describe "the real," the space of their pages is either fragmented in islands of local determinisms, or saturated by aporetical descriptions which attempt to grasp infinities within infinities. The paradoxes of open series, heterotopias and rhizomatic taxonomies bring the two writers to reconsider those spatial categories which constitute the basis of our epistemology.

Like sand through a screen, the empirical world escapes the grid of even the most diaphanous poetic taxonomies by Perec and Calvino. Yet, despite the constant failure of their hermeneutical projects, the two authors never give up weaving their literary topographies. In so doing, their narrative is symptomatic of the postmodern condition, as described by Lyotard. The notion of system, the possibility of arranging data according to a master-narrative, must be reconsidered in order to accommodate phenomena such as entropy and local determinisms.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory) -- Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 1991.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 52-11, Section: A, page: 3916.

Supervisor: Gerald Prince.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.