The imagery in the “descriptions” of the invisible cities, as well as the organizing conceit (Marco Polo describes his travels in Kublai Khan’s empire), directly use semiotic processes, in the descriptions creating amorphous, intriguing, mystifying images that appeal to a reader’s imagination and in the narration forcing the reader to confront the distortions and biases involved in narration. However, Calvino uses semiotics to explicitly shape this book (at least in the early parts). To be sure, such semantic issues are not most readers’ concern, and many novelists use their semantic knowledge to shape the narrative and novel’s details without specifying any semiotic issues. Indeed, Leibniz often refers to literary examples to substantiate his position, and I argue that this reveals an essential feature of his theory.Įdgar Allan Poe’s quote succinctly sums up this novel, and Calvino uses contemporary writers’ fascination with the limitations and functions of language to show how this occurs: how a sign means something else (and not itself) how a description restricts the totality of the experience how a person’s experience is limited by previous experiences and bias whether a form or pattern can be found that expresses an ultimate value or truth the roles of desire and fear what silence communicates et cetera. I suggest that there is a rather strong relation between the theory of literary fiction implicit in Invisible Cities and Leibniz's theory of possibility, in that both define the possible in terms of the conceivable. The paper presents Leibniz's theory of possibility in its metaphysical context and explores the similarity (as well as some differences) with Calvino's cities in their literary context. The main similarity is that both theories are combinatorial-they suppose that possibilities are produced by combination and variation of basic elements. I argue that there is a close affinity between Calvino's theory of fictional cities and Leibniz's theory of possible worlds. The method turns on decomposing a city down to its basic elements and recomposing it in different ways through the imagination. Implicit in this book is also a theory about how all possible cities are composed. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities presents a wide array of possible cities-cities whose composition turns on a productive ambiguity of their being described or invented by Marco Polo in his conversations with Kublai Khan. Finally, by focusing on space as an intersection of cognitive science and narratology, the project examines narratives ranging from spontaneous natural language utterances to the highly developed examples of literary art found in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World to explore how our biology shapes and is reflected in our stories. Two experimental paradigms are developed and preliminary data presented in an effort to answer the question posed by Salmon Rushdie’s character Haroun of Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “what good are stories if they aren’t even true?” That is, what might be the biological value of the human compulsion to engage in narrative? The data support the notion that interpreting stories together primes subjects for joint action tasks, opening a connection of narrative to evolutionary processes of group selection. This project applies a classic biological heuristic, Tinbergen’s Four Questions, to gain a fresh perspective on storytelling and to explore story as a signature activity of mind. Any behavior that is shared by all people everywhere must have a basis in our most shared heritage, our biology. Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio even puts a kind of “wordless storytelling” at the very root of his model of human consciousness. In Cosmopolitanism, Kwame Anthony Appiah writes “people tell and discuss stories in every culture as far back as the record goes.” Donald Brown agrees in his comprehensive cross-cultural anthropological survey, Human Universals, by including mythmaking, a kind of storytelling, in his list of practices that humans everywhere do.
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