Contesting the 'Human': The Anti-Anthropocentric Dictums in Italo Calvino’s The Cosmicomics

Humanities

Eminent Italian writer Italo Calvino’s illustrious work The Cosmicomics is a fictional demonstrator of the notion of anthropomorphism that the writer has admittedly used as a narrative device in the mentioned work. Calvino has made the theoretical illustrations of the above-mentioned notion in his illustrious critical treatise The Literature Machine. His attack against ‘anthropocentrism’ or a human-centered worldview is evident in this work and what he promotes instead is rather an anthropomorphic worldview where the longstanding conceptual boundary between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human’ disappears and the non-human entities of the world are attributed with human qualities. In this theoretical pretext, the present article intends to examine how Calvino in this mentioned work creates a ‘boundary-less’ world where the human becomes the non-human and vice-versa in a scenario where the traditional human subject is thoroughly de-centered.

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