Literatura e ciência no ensaio “cibernética e fantasmas” de Italo Calvino

Abstract

Our main question is thinking of the convergences and divergences between literature and science in the texts by Italo Calvino, a writer that, asking himself about the new directions in several fields of knowledge in 20th century, after its conceptual and methodological paradigms collapsed, had been dedicated to reading studies and 52 theories that recover a broad variety of scientific disciplines. His essay “Cibernetic and ghosts” can be considered an important point of departure to put this relationship on focus, because it shows the primary elements of the debate: literature as combinatory machine and as mythical extrapolation of the language, author as plurality of “I” that coordinate the machine and reader as its ghost. So, Calvino seems to undo the most crystallized vision regarding literature as exclusive space for author’s subjectivity and regarding science as something based on precise and rigorous procedures, transmitted also by an exact and close language.