Names, Travelers, Transindividuality: Italo Calvino in the 1970s

Situating the novel within the cultural, literary and political milieu of the period, this article provides a reading of Italo Calvino‟s 1979 hypernovel If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and its relation to the French literary group Oulipo. It analyzes the work‟s link to questions of authorship and collectivity at the core of 1970s literary, philosophical, and political discourse both in Italy and France. In particular, the analysis concentrates on the function of names in the novel as signifiers of individuality and/or collectivit

Q’s General Intellect

I would claim that the main feature of the general intellect, in all its forms, is its indeterminacy. Neither defining individuality nor a specific group, the general intellect represents a sort of passage between the singular and the multitude. Until now, the discussion of the concept of the general intellect has been the prerogative of economists, sociologists, philosophers and historians. I intend to demonstrate how this notion has also influenced the literary field, and, in particular, how the general intellect is an active element in the narration of Q, the novel written in 1999 by the writers’ collective ‘Luther Blissett Project’