El imperio de la imagotipia: visiones de Japón en Roland Barthes e Italo Calvino

Abstract

This paper uses the tools of Imagology to reflect on the stereotyping processes underlying the literary and cultural relations between East and West. More specifically, we’ll focus on the image of Japan in the work of the French intellectual Roland Barthes and the Italian writer Italo Calvino, as well as the possible points of coincidence between them. In any case, this vision will be marked by the feared and unavoidable presence of stereotype, the basic mechanism for literature. In fact, faced with the idea of an oppositional duality between ideological and utopian visions of the foreign dimension, we’ll try to show that ideology and utopia are two inseparable sides of every literary and stereotypical process.