La lettura sensuale e molteplice: per un contributo al concetto di performance in Italo Calvino

Abstract

Starting from the consideration of the difficulty of writing, Calvino writes at the end of the seventies his perhaps most debated novel: If at a winter night a traveller. Fascinated by conceptual art (Paolini, in primis), Calvino elaborates in a fundamental essay, The squaring (1975), the guiding lines of the hiper-novel of ’79 and a personal performative theory of his, through which the reader approaches the reading and the pleasure of the text following a course of cooperation and a construction of the text. Close to the theories of the reception which were being worked out in those same years, Calvino reaches in this way an original vision of writing and reading starting from the elaboration of a «mental space», a moment of extreme synergy and a performative will which is established between the person «who makes» and the one «who looks at» or reads the work of art, ending by changing the inner sintax itself of the text.