| This dissertation concentrates on the notion of possible and impossible worlds in contemporary Italian literature and especially in the works of Italo Calvino, Roberto Vecchioni, and Jadelin Mabiala Gangbo. The original idea in this work is that literature's hospitality breaks institutional barriers (not so long ago these works could not have been presented in a literary study) and has important philosophical and political implications. The hospitality of literature consists in the reader's hospitality towards the text and the hospitality that the text offers to the reader when he ventures into an impossible world while relearning his own in a different manner.;In the second chapter I focus on the novels of Italo Calvino, particularly on Le città invisibili and Il conte di Montecristo . The work of Calvino is related to the work of the Dutch graphic artist Mauritius Cornelius Escher. Both authors, even if with different media, created possible and impossible worlds using metalepsis, on the textual as well the visual level, while inventing a disturbing cognitive cartography for the reader. Calvino has a very important place in this dissertation because his works opened the path to a multiplicity of fictional worlds that require new cognitive parameters and justify the notion of literature's hospitality.;The third chapter focus on the construction of impossible worlds by Roberto Vecchioni, a famous singer-songwriter (cantautore), turned fiction writer. I explore the relationship between the canzone d'autore and literature and analyze the novel Viaggi del tempo immobile , published by Einaudi in 1998, where metalepsis keeps confusing the reader while problematizing the relationship between reality and fiction.;The fourth chapter is dedicated to the work of a young migrant writer, Jadelin Gangbo, who, with the novel Rometta e Giulieo, destabilizes the frontiers of fiction and the literary canon. The writer's identity and the borders of fiction are redefined in this modern parody of Shakespeare where the narrator enters the world of his fictional characters.;In the first chapter I analyze possible and impossible worlds in order to describe their narrative mechanisms. Impossible worlds are fictional constructs that destabilize the gnoseologic horizon of the reader and are presented as paradoxes. From a narratological point of view, the paradox is a metalepsis, disturbing narrative levels and ontological borders of the text while interrogating our notions of space, time and identity.;In the last chapter I explore the experience of hospitality, as a cultural and textual practice, because hospitality is the crossroads where all the different subjects of this thesis converge. I analyze the etymology and the history of the concept of hospitality, and I examine the idea of the hospes that defines our relationship with the Other outside the fiction.;Keywords: possible worlds, impossible worlds, paradox, metalepsis, Italian novel, hospitality, migrant writing, Italo Calvino, Roberto Vecchioni, Jadelin Gangbo. |
