Italic Calvino: The Place of the Emperor in Invisible Cities

As if hesitating on some sort of threshold between the modern and the postmodern, the novel presents a double structure of narrativity and seriality. . . . The seriality of the cities defines the trait we shall treat as postmodern, while the framing device, the narrative of those cities which would put them into a certain perspective, relates to a modern, or in any case pre-postmodern, esthetic of a mise-en-abyme or "narrative context." (James, "Seriality" 144)