SOURCE: “Italo Calvino and What's Next: The Literature of Monstrous Possibility,” in Iowa Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. 128–39.

In the following essay, White places Calvino's short fiction within the context of postmodern literature.

I'd like to talk about Italo Calvino (particularly his two science-fictive books of stories, Cosmicomics and t zero) within the context of a more general discussion of “postmodernism” and John Barth's idea of “the literature of exhaustion.” I would begin by rectifying the almost universal misunderstanding of “the literature of exhaustion” (as another sign of the death of the novel), but, fortunately, Barth's own later essay, “The Literature of Replenishment,”¹ has already unambiguously set things straight. It is enough to say that Barth's first essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,”² was not a gloomy prophesy of the end of the novel, or fiction, or print. Rather, both it and “The Literature of Replenishment” are about a...