Explicating the incipits: a writer's journey in Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler

Abstract

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT AUTHOR'S REQUEST.] Much of the scholarly work on Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler focuses on the importance of the R/reader in the text by looking at the numbered chapters as the framework through which the entirety of the text can be understood. The relationship between the writer and the reader is indeed vitally important to an understanding of the text, but within each of the titled chapters, or incipits as many refer to them, there exists more than simply a series of genre samples - the spy novel, the detective novel, the thriller. Approaching the novel from the perspective of a writer and reading the titled chapters as allegories of the writing process itself rather than mere novel fragments designed to move the plot of the numbered chapters forward, provides the opportunity to construct a new text that puts the writer, as well as the reader, at the center of the process of textual creation and the production of textual truth.