Italo Calvino: A Select Bibliography

Compiled by Ralph Dumain

Primary

Calvino, Italo. If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1981.

___________. The Literature Machine: Essays, translated by Patrick Creagh. London: Secker and Warburg, 1987.

Part 1:
Cybernetics and Ghosts
Two Interviews on Science and Literature
Philosophy and Literature
Literature as Projection of Desire
Definitions of Territories: Comedy
Definitions of Territories: Eroticism
Definitions of Territories: Fantasy
Cinema and the Novel: Problems of Narrative
Whom Do We Write For? or The Hypothetical Bookshelf
Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature
Levels of Reality in Literature
Part 2:
Why Read the Classics?
The Odysseys Within the Odyssey
Ovid and Universal Contiguity
The Structure of Orlando Furioso
Candide: An Essay in Velocity
The City as Protagonist in Balzac
The Novel as Spectacle
Manzoni’s The Betrothed: The Novel of Ratios of Power
On Fourier, I: Brief Introduction to the Society of Love
On Fourier, II: The Controller of Desires
On Fourier, III: Envoi: A Utopia of Fine Dust [See Italo Calvino on Literature Machines & Utopia]
Guide to The Charterhouse of Parma for the Use of New Readers
Stendhal’s Knowledge of the “Milky Way”
Montale’s Rock
The Pen in the First Person
In Memory of Roland Barthes
The Bestiary of Marianne Moore
Man, the Sky, and the Elephant
Cyrano on the Moon
By Way of an Autobiography

___________. Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, translated by Tim Parks. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Pantheon Books; New York: Vintage Books, 1995.

“The Burning of the Abominable House,” pp. 156-169.

___________. “Prose and Anticombinatorics,” in Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, translated and edited by Warren F. Motte, Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), pp. 143-152.

___________. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988), translated by Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.

___________. The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh. San Diego; New York; London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.

“Cybernetics and Ghosts” (November 1967), pp. 3-27.

Weiss, p. 160, note 17: ‘Unfortunately the English version omits the subtitle of Calvino’s lecture: “Appunti sulla narrativa come processo combinatorio” (comments concerning narrative as a combinatory process)’.

___________. Why Read the Classics? (1991), translated by Martin McLaughlin. New York: Pantheon Books, 1999.

Secondary

Botta, Anna, “Calvino and the Oulipo: An Italian Ghost in the Combinatory Machine?” MLN, Vol. 112, No. 1, January 1997, pp. 81-89.

Cavallaro, Dani. The Mind of Italo Calvino: A Critical Exploration of His Thought and Writings. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2010.

Duncan, Dennis. “Calvino, Llull, Lucretius: Two Models of Literary Combinatorics,” Comparative Literature 64.1 (2012): 93-109.

Duncan, Dennis. Oulipo and Modern Thought. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Chapter 4: Calvino at a Crossroads: Combinatorics and Anticombinatorics, pp. 100-121.

Habermas, Jürgen. “Philosophy and Science as Literature?” (1998) in Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, translated by William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 205-227.

Jones, Josh. Italo Calvino Offers 14 Reasons We Should Read the Classics, Open Culture, August 12, 2014.

Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco, edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia, Carolyn Korsmeyer, Rodolphe Gasché. New York: Routledge, 2002

Anthony J. Cascardi, “Mimesis and Modernism: The Case of Jorge Luis Borges,” pp. 109-127.
Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, “A Method for the New Millennium: Calvino and Irony,” pp. 129-148.
Henry Sussman, “The Writing of the System: Borges’s Library and Calvino’s Traffic,” pp. 149-164.
Wladimir Krysinski, “Borges, Calvino, Eco: The Philosophies of Metafiction,” pp. 185-204.
Ermanno Bencivenga, “Philosophy and Literature in Calvino’s Tales,” pp. 205-221.

Merrell, Floyd. “The Writing of Forking Paths: Borges, Calvino, and Postmodern Models of Writing,” Variaciones Borges 3, 1997, pp. 56-68.

Modena, Letizia. Italo Calvino’s Architecture of Lightness: The Utopian Imagination in an Age of Urban Crisis. New York; London: Routledge, 2011.

Rinaldi, Mark Thomas. All At One Point: The New Physics of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges.  CUNY Academic Works, 2014. PhD dissertation, Comparative Literature.

Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.

Italo Calvino on Literature Machines & Utopia

Review: Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
by R. Dumain

"‘Philosophy’ and ‘Literature’: Relationships of Genres and the Frontiers of Thought"
by R. Dumain

Definition of ’Pataphysics by Alfred Jarry

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Study Materials on the Web

Philosophical Style: Selected Bibliography

Cybernetics & Artificial Intelligence: Ideology Critique

Ars Combinatoria Study Guide

Ars Combinatoria @ Studies in a Dying Culture

Offsite:

Ars Combinatoria @ Ĝirafo (blog)

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Introduction:
In A Nutshell (Shmoop)