Paper Topics: If on a winter's night a traveler
Due May 20
2. If on a winter's night a traveler is an unusually open novel, in part because the various stories it contains are unfinished. Does the novel supply what Stanley Fish would call a "text"? What problems does the novel cause for the Reader (the character) and for the reader (you) because of its indeterminacy? What does the novel suggest about the role(s) of readers in creating the meaning of a text?
3. Reading in If on a winter's night a traveler seems closely related to sexuality. (The Reader, Inerio, Marana, and Flannery all express a sexual interest in Ludmilla that is related to her role as the Other Reader; all of the stories they read are concerned with sexuality and sexual rivalry.) Discuss the ways and occasions where reading and sex overlap and merge. What does their connection suggest about the nature of both activities?
4. What are the basic patterns of character, action, and theme that run through the ten stories that the Reader reads in If on a winter's night a traveler? What are the significant variations? What are the connections between these stories and the story in which the Reader is himself engaged?
5. Alternatively, you could analyze in detail one of the stories to show how it resonates with other stories in the novel, particularly the story of the two Readers. How does a particular story suggest or embody some of the major ideas and issues of the novel?
6. Imagine a further episode in which the Reader goes to a conference or seminar in which the principle speakers are E. D. Hirsch, Michel Foucault, Stanley Fish, and Silas Flannery (or Italo Calvino) in that order. The speeches given by the first three are later published as the essays we have read. What would Flannery/Calvino have to say about the ideas of the author articulated by or implicit in the others? Write Flannery's speech.
7. Some of the characters of the novel fall into apparently contrasting pairs-particularly Flannery and Marana, Ludmilla and Lotaria, the Reader and Irnerio, and many of the characters in the interpolated stories. Discuss the function of contrast as a way of organizing the book. What ideas or groups of ideas does such contrast suggest? How is contrast useful in making such suggestions?
8. You could write a similar paper about the doubling of characters both in the Reader story and in the stories read. What does the doubling of characters say about the issues of identity, reality, and perception in the novel? You might go on to reflect on the relationship of doubled characters to contrasting characters as it suggests the overlapping of similarity and difference.
9. Several of the critical theorists we have read talk about the role of contexts in determining the meaning of what readers read. How does that idea apply to If on a winter's nigh a traveler? In particular, how does the Reader story supply a context for reading the other stories?
10. In the course of If on a winter's life a traveler novels are categorized in various way-the organization of books in a bookstore, the books in Ludmilla's apartment, kinds of books to be censored, books from various countries or in various languages, and so forth. Who makes such classifications, what criteria are they based on, and what are their functions? What do the categories tells us about novels and the people who use them?
11. In Chapter 11 we are introduced to the views about reading of seven readers in the library, as well as those of the Reader. In addition we have an informed (but not necessarily consistent) sense of what Ludmilla looks for in reading. Discriminate as carefully as you can the different (or similar) positions that they take about reading. To what degree and in what ways do they echo the positions of Hirsch, Foucault, and Fish? How helpful are they to a reader of If on w winter's night a traveler?
12. Reading is a kind of perception. What can the experience of reading If on a winter's night a traveller tell its readers about the ways in which they read? What can it tell them about the ways in which they perceive things and understand what they perceive?
13. Both Silas Flannery and the library readers reflect on the problems of beginning, continuing, and finishing for both the writer and reader. What are the problems of beginning and ending, and how do they differ for readers and writers? Discuss the beginning or end of If on a winter's night a traveler (or both). How does the beginning establish the nature of the novel and the way in which it might be read? To what extent does the ending of If on a winter's night a traveler solve or fail to solve the problem of ending?
14. With the exception of the first story, virtually all of the stories read by the reader are translations or in foreign languages. A central character of the novel is the translator Ermes Marana, whose apocrypha conspiracy seeks the dissemination of false books. What is the significance of the theme of translation in the novel, and how is it related to the problem of determining an authentic text?
15. If on a winter's night a traveler contains a number of unconventional elements of fiction-writing: it is written in the second person; it contains a number of incomplete stories; not only is it a novel about the writing, production, and reading of novels, but it contains a characterized novelist who may turn out to write this novel (so that the Reader may shift from a real person reading the novel to a character in the novel to a character in the novel written in the novel). Discuss several of these unconventional elements. What functions do they serve in the novel? What significance do they imply? What is their effect on you the real (non-fictional) reader?
16. Although If on a winter's night a traveler is unconventional in some respects, it can be thought of as conventional in others. (It contains, after all, a number of openings of novels that often seem familiar in pattern or tone.) What is the relation of the various authors, readers, and texts of this novel to the authors, readers, and texts of other novels?
17. "It is not in order to be the spokesman for something definable that I would like to erase myself," Silas Flannery writes. "Only to transmit the writable that remains to be written, the tellable that nobody tells" (171). "For this woman," Arkadian Porphyrich says of Ludmilla, "reading means stripping herself of every purpose, every foregone conclusion, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not ye have the words to say" (239). For Ludmilla and perhaps for Flannery, writing and reading mean the transmission of something that goes beyond language itself. How is this possible? Does If on a winter's night a traveler achieve such transmission? How?
18. In addition to having a variety of texts and readers, If on a winter’s night a traveler has a variety of authors: Italo Calvino, Tazio Bazakbal, Ukko Ahti, Vorts Viljandi,, Bertand Vandervelde, Silas Flannery (genuine and false?), Takakumi Ikoka, Calixto Bandera, and Anatolin Anatoly, in addition to the possible deceptions of Ermes Marana. Moreover, several of these novelists (Italo Calvino and Silas Flannery) conspicuously reflect on authorship and themselves as authors. As if this were not enough, Mr. Cavedagna considers his experience as a publisher of authors, and Ludmilla distinguishes sharply between the author as an ordinary person and the author as the writer of books. Compare the various ideas of authors implied or developed in If on a winter’s night a traveler to the views of Hirsch and Foucault.