Rewriting the <em>Fiaba</em>: Collective Signification in Italo Calvino's <em>Il castello dei destini incrociati</em>

Structure de l’intrigue : limites de la géométrie et de la symétrie dans Le Château des destins croisés d’Italo Calvino

“…By creating new juxtapositions of recognizable words and images, the storyteller enriched his primitive language, just as Calvino intended to enrich literary language by forging as yet unimagined connections between existing signs. 5 2 Our analysis will combine some of Vladimir Propp's folktale functions with certain precepts of the Parisian literary group established in 1960 by a collective of French mathematicians and writers, known as Oulipo -Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), the most famous of whom included Queneau, Perec and François Le Lionnais. Although Calvino was admitted to their ranks in 1973, by this time he had acquired a number of combinatory techniques that approached the creation of literary machines in that the text, once set in motion by the reader, generated meanings through various explicit or implicit instructions or through its very structure which shunned linearity.…”