Kwan Lung Chan 
Applied Poststructuralism. Italo Calvino’s ’A Sign in Space’ 

Essay from the year 2019 in the subject Literature – Modern Literature, grade: B, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, language: English, abstract: This essay tries to apply the poststructuralist viewpoint onto Italo Calvino’s book ’The complete cosmicomics’.

According to Barry (2017), the poststructuralists look into paradoxes and uncertainties as they think that signs’ meanings depend on the perceiver, and different people would have different perceptions. There is no way to be certain whether an author is conveying the meanings as such, as language has its own limitation too, i.e. it is limited to the words that can be used in the language and the meaning can vary according to time and place, not to mention the perception of different people. A Sign in Space explores how signs can be unreliable and meaningless by constantly creating paradoxes: the ‘idea of sign making’ paradox, the omnipotence paradox and the ‘existence of space’ paradox. It also explores how our perceptions can be unreliable by looking into the narrator’s perception over Kgwgk’s sign erasure action.