POSTMODERNIST WRITING IN IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELLER, BY ITALO CALVINO

• Autor(a) principal: Baryshnikova Marques, Yana
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Outros Autores: Gumarães Ustimenko, Maria Helena
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34630/polissema.vi19.3657
• topic: pós-modernismo, Italo Calvino, literatura comparada, hipertexto, metaficção, hiper-realidade; postmodernism, Italo Calvino, comparative literature, hypertext, metafiction, hyperreality

The purpose of this paper is to outline the principles and methods that distinguish a postmodern literary work. The case study is based on the analysis of the stylistic tools used by Italo Calvino in his famous novel, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, that turned this work into an example of postmodern literature. The theoretical fundaments are namely based on the concepts of postmodernism by Jean Baudrillard, Ihab Hassan, Matei Calinescu and David Damrosch. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, written in a nonlinear narrative form, includes ten stylistically different stories that terminate suddenly at their climax. By means of postmodern tools, Calvino deconstructs a conceptual narrative, replacing it with a complex textual structure that is ambiguous and engaging at the same time. In this stylistic exercise Calvino exemplifies the models and types of the modern novel (from neorealism to surrealism, through fantasy and neo-avant-garde literature) and presents in a metanarrative form his conception of the novel as a combinatory game of words in which reality is replaced by the linguistic universe. A text would thus be the passage from the world of things to the world of words, from the living world to the verbal one; in short, from the unwritten world to the written world – as a literary place par excellence.