Rhizomatic Cities in Italo Calvino’s <i>Invisible Cities</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Italo Calvino’s highly successful novel Invisible Cities thoroughly explains Deleuze and Guattari’s famous postmodern concept of rhizome. The cities in the novel do not possess a fixed and coherent structure; rather they exude a structurality that is immensely fleeting and continually evolving. Calvino’s novel Invisible Cities which ironically precedes Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus clearly demonstrates the defining characteristic features of rhizome through the unusual and seemingly incomprehensible structure of the individual cities. There have been scanty critical responses in the past regarding the rhizomatic behavior of Calvino’s cities, despite an extraordinary abundance of critical works existing on Calvino’s writing. The rhizomatic patterns of Calvino’s cities, it is believed by the author, need further critical attention. Rhizome, through its perpetually unstable structural modeling, perhaps most effectively demonstrates our utterly disarrayed postmodern condition of existence where any desired structural stability and coherence is a virtual impossibility, and of this trait, Calvino’s cities in the said novel are the principal demonstrators. Based on these precepts, this article intends to analyze how Calvino’s cities in the novel, with their perpetual and immense structural variabilities, exude before the readers a typical postmodern world that wholesomely discards the very idea of structural coherence and stability.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".