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What We Desire, We Shall Never Have: Calvino, Zizek, and Ovid

What We Desire, We Shall Never Have: Calvino, Zizek, and Ovid Repetition and Negativity Italo Calvino is almost certainly the most discussed Italian writer of the latter twentieth century, having fared particularly well in the English-speaking world. Calvino criticism in English typically produces a monograph and a couple dozen articles per year, covering discussions of utopia, fantasy, postmodernism, hypertext, landscape, and, most recently, the role of the visual in his fiction, from cinema and painting to ekphrasis (see Belpoliti and Ricci). Those discussions of Calvino are also not infrequently comparative in nature, indicating the degree to which Calvino has been adopted as one of the few Italian mainstays of modern “world literature.” There are, however, some notable lacunae in Calvino criticism: in particular, there is a certain penury of psychoanalytic criticism. As Kathryn Hume pointed out in 1992, “oddly little has been done to analyze the psychological substrates” in Calvino’s writing, apart from an occasional invocation of Lacan “with regard to the mirror images in Invisible Cities” (14). However, this lack of psychoanalytic criticism is perhaps not so odd after all. For much of his career, Calvino was a highly cerebral writer, at times almost mechanical in his approach, especially in the works that were most directly related to http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

What We Desire, We Shall Never Have: Calvino, Zizek, and Ovid

RUSHING, ROBERT
Comparative Literature , Volume 58 (1) – Jan 1, 2006
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2006 by University of Oregon
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/-58-1-44
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Abstract

Repetition and Negativity Italo Calvino is almost certainly the most discussed Italian writer of the latter twentieth century, having fared particularly well in the English-speaking world. Calvino criticism in English typically produces a monograph and a couple dozen articles per year, covering discussions of utopia, fantasy, postmodernism, hypertext, landscape, and, most recently, the role of the visual in his fiction, from cinema and painting to ekphrasis (see Belpoliti and Ricci). Those discussions of Calvino are also not infrequently comparative in nature, indicating the degree to which Calvino has been adopted as one of the few Italian mainstays of modern “world literature.” There are, however, some notable lacunae in Calvino criticism: in particular, there is a certain penury of psychoanalytic criticism. As Kathryn Hume pointed out in 1992, “oddly little has been done to analyze the psychological substrates” in Calvino’s writing, apart from an occasional invocation of Lacan “with regard to the mirror images in Invisible Cities” (14). However, this lack of psychoanalytic criticism is perhaps not so odd after all. For much of his career, Calvino was a highly cerebral writer, at times almost mechanical in his approach, especially in the works that were most directly related to

Journal

Comparative Literature – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2006

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