ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by discussing the fantastic content and repetitive form of traditional folk and fairy tales. It goes on to refer to the importance of fun and playfulness in such stories, which form, in childhood, a sense of our ability to evade tragedy or overcome difficulty. Benjamin’s Theses on a Philosophy of History is briefly referred to as an example of formal play, before Italo Calvino becomes the focus. Calvino’s collection of tales is compared with the structural strategies of his Oulipean experiments with novel-writing. A discussion of the relationship between play as freedom and structure as limitation ensues and leads to the chapter’s conclusion in further comparisons of modernism, postmodernism, and altermodernism as possible cultural paradigms.
