Cities as Cognitive Maps: Memory, Mind, and Mental Health in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities
Authors :Dr. Shinoj PV
Abstract
Abstract: Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities uses a literary lens to reflect on the processes of memory as they relate to cognitive and psychological mappings. The argument presented by this paper is that Calvino’s use of imagined cities serves as external manifestations of various mental processes associated with memory, including recollection, repetition, fragmentation, and cognitive overload, and that they can be considered an environment, or a space in which people can live with the implications of these memory processes. Rather than displaying illness through clinical realism, Invisible Cities provides spatial representations of the states of individuals thus making memory a part of the inhabitable spaces formed by the individual's mental condition, and memory creates a fragile balance between the individual's capacity to remember and forget. The close textual analysis of Invisible Cities is supported by the insights from Aleida Assmann, Paul Ricoeur, Cathy Caruth, Arthur Frank, Rita Charon, and the work of numerous scholars of Calvino. This paper places Invisible Cities as a major interdisciplinary text that connects literature, memory studies, and the medical humanities.
Keywords: memory, cognitive mapping, mental health, medical humanities, narrative, space
