Invisible Cities as a Postmodern Text: A Multidimensional Approach

Abstract

Famous Italian author Italo Calvino’s popular novel <em>Invisible Cities</em>opens itself up for multidimensional theoretical and critical interventions due to its interesting and multifarious providence of scope for such interventions. Considering the diversity of interpretative scope the text offers, its reception in classroom both by students and teachers is equally critical and variegated. The text thus offers itself for multiple and divergent critical receptions and some of the critical receptions that can be made to the text include spatiality, temporality, magic realism, and a few other postmodernist approaches. My specific approach in this article shall be to explore and analyse the various possibilities of postmodernist critical receptions of the text through many interesting and revelatory postmodernist notions and concepts propounded by many famous postmodernist thinkers and philosophers like Michael Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and Jean Baudrillard. In this article, I will explore how certain philosophical and theoretical postulates propounded by these philosophers/theorists become potent and effective critical tools to study the mentioned novel of Calvino and how these concepts open up new vistas of critical, comprehension, reception and interpretation of the text.