Event Title
Consider the Mantis Shrimp: Semiotics and Authorship in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler
Location
King Building 321
Document Type
Presentation
Start Date
4-28-2017 3:00 PM
End Date
4-28-2017 4:20 PM
Abstract
This paper explores the production of literary meaning in Italo Calvino’s "If on a winter’s night a traveler." This novel describes a second-person narrator’s (nicknamed “the Reader”) journey through ten different manuscript segments as he tries to read the new book "If on a winter’s night a traveler." In trying to find the text, the Reader travels from living room to classroom to publishing house to author’s home and back to a book club. By representing the various stages at which literary meaning is created, this novel forces us to examine the relationship between the Reader and our academic project of assigning meaning to a novel. By putting this novel in conversation with Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” and Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,” I will explore a fundamental tension between these two dominant methods of literary analysis. Barthes relies on objective truth that can be transcribed by an author, while Derrida challenges the possibility that any universal truth can exist for readers. For us, this tension is deeply troubling: this novel seemingly supports these two oppositional modes of reading. In doing so, the novel disrupts both our analytic methods in English and our wider understanding of how and why we read. Placing these three texts in conversation with each other illuminates the fluidity with which readers create meaning and allows us to critique our own subconscious assumptions as readers and thinkers studying English literature.
Keywords:
modernism, semiotics, authorship
Recommended Citation
Ginsberg, Zoe, "Consider the Mantis Shrimp: Semiotics and Authorship in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler" (04/28/17). Senior Symposium. 21.
https://digitalcommons.oberlin.edu/seniorsymp/2017/presentations/21
Major
English; History
Advisor(s)
Laura Baudot, English
Clayton Koppes, History
Project Mentor(s)
Wendy Hyman, English
April 2017
Consider the Mantis Shrimp: Semiotics and Authorship in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler
King Building 321
This paper explores the production of literary meaning in Italo Calvino’s "If on a winter’s night a traveler." This novel describes a second-person narrator’s (nicknamed “the Reader”) journey through ten different manuscript segments as he tries to read the new book "If on a winter’s night a traveler." In trying to find the text, the Reader travels from living room to classroom to publishing house to author’s home and back to a book club. By representing the various stages at which literary meaning is created, this novel forces us to examine the relationship between the Reader and our academic project of assigning meaning to a novel. By putting this novel in conversation with Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” and Jacques Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences,” I will explore a fundamental tension between these two dominant methods of literary analysis. Barthes relies on objective truth that can be transcribed by an author, while Derrida challenges the possibility that any universal truth can exist for readers. For us, this tension is deeply troubling: this novel seemingly supports these two oppositional modes of reading. In doing so, the novel disrupts both our analytic methods in English and our wider understanding of how and why we read. Placing these three texts in conversation with each other illuminates the fluidity with which readers create meaning and allows us to critique our own subconscious assumptions as readers and thinkers studying English literature.
Notes
Session II, Panel 8 - Literary | Comparisons
Moderator: Jed Deppman, Professor of Comparative Literature and English