L’Italo Calvino di Can Xue: l’appropriazione di un modello intellettuale

In this paper, I analyse the long-standing favourable position occupied from the 80s of last century by Italo Calvino as a model-intellectual in the Chinese cultural field, focusing on the Chinese writer Can Xue’s interpretation of his novels. Through the close-reading practice applied to his texts, Can Xue tries to support her concept of “pure literature”, exploiting the “consecrating” power of the acclaimed Italian writer, even though her literary theories and position are nowadays marginalised to an elitarian view of culture. The effective interaction of literary ideas and style, crossing the borders of different epochs and cultures, demonstrates the possibilities of a discipline – comparative literature – which is far from being dead (Spivak 2005).