Looking For The Export Of The Maze

Italo Calvino is one of the most important writers in the history of Western novel in twentieth century.Facing visual culture's popularity today,Calvino keeps exploring the territory of literature with his rich and varied literature practices and criticism. Published in 1979,If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a novel about novel,in which Calvino demonstrates his thinking on the relationship between language and literature, writing and translation,literature and sexuality,political ideology,and history etc.. The thinking represents Calvino's attribution to literature theory in twentieth century and sheds important light on our thinking of literature's present and future.In this encyclopedia novel,the exploration of narrative structure and the thinking on the relationship between text,reader and writer are two pivotal parts.This thesis attempts to discuss the narrative device and the theoretical thinking represented in the device,using narrative theories,reader-response theory and Calvino's own literature theory.This thesis is composed of four chapters.Chapter one is an introduction to Calvino and If on a Winter 's Night a Traveler,including an introduction to the researches on this novel.Chapter two discusses the labyrinth narrative devices,including three narrative devices:mise en abyme,ten novels with absent closures and a crystal structure,to illustrate Calvino's exploration toward complexity.Chapter three and four discuss Calvino's thinking on the relationship between writer,reader and text, and how this thinking is demonstrated in the novel.Chapter three analyzes the readers' images in the text and narrative voices and devices to indicate the function of the writers which is ubiquitous in the novel.Chapter four analyzes the writers' images in the novel to indicate the readers behind the writers in order to discuss the relationship between writer,reader and text.