‘Invisible cities’ has continued to attract attention since its publication, and its imaginative and thought-provoking writing has been enjoyed by readers.
City as the most significant topic，Calvino was keenly aware of the ethical and social necessity of urban renewal. He chose to theorize and present his concept of utopia in the form of a novel, as a perceptual and cognitive therapy of the imagination, which would enable his readers (or travelers) to envision alternatives to existing urban forms and social practices.
Then, the post-modern presentation of the whole book leaves many readers at a loss, but at the same time, a large number of readers can still extract quotations and sentences from it and gain insights from them. Inspired by such excerpts, a kind of machine approach that encodes text in sentences is applied to uncover implicit themes in the text.
Topic model is a type of statistical model for discovering the abstract "topics" that occur in a collection of documents. It is a frequently used text-mining tool for discovery of hidden semantic structures in a text body.
Through the topic modeling, there are NINE clustered themes were identified through BERTopic*. The most common one is full of depictions of the details of urban life, and it complements the author's desire to convey a sense of humanity in the city and a critique of modernity.
In addition to this, there are still eight other themes that were summarized and eventually merged into seven, they are:
*BERTopic is a language model. It takes advantage of deep learning and clustering strategy, especially BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), which is a a deep learning model and performance well in respond Natural Language Process.
Key words (or metaphors):
Topic Explanation: Modern life has brought unprecedented convenience, but at the same time, personal life has gradually become a cog in the movie Modern Times, repeating itself over and over again, so boring that people want to escape.
Most representative sentence:
'But all the trades and professions of the living Eusapia are also at work below ground, or at least those that the living performed with more contentment than irritation: the clockmaker, amid all the stopped clocks of his shop, places his parchment ear against an out-of-tune grandfather clock; a barber, with dry brush, lathers the cheekbones of an actor learning his role, studying the script with hollow sockets; a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heifer.'
——CITIES & THE DEAD 3
Key words (or metaphors):
Topic Explanation: The gaze is often a projection of desire. In the giant machine that is the city, this gaze is littered with views from elsewhere.
Most representative sentence:
"When the camel-driver sees, at the horizon of the tableland, the pinnacles of the skyscrapers come into view, the radar antennae, the white and red windsocks flapping, the chimneys belching smoke, he thinks of a ship; he knows it is a city, but he thinks of it as a vessel that will take him away from the desert, a windjammer about to cast off, with the breeze already swelling the sails, not yet unfurled, or a steamboat with its boiler vibrating in the iron keel;"
——CITIES & DESIRE 3
Topic Explanation: The city grows, but at the same time it brings disaster to the city in another way. Calvino uses rats, among other things, as metaphors to convey the crisis he perceives behind the prosperity.
Most representative sentence:
"When the sky was cleared of condors, they had to face the propagation of serpents; the spiders' extermination allowed the flies to multiply into a black swarm; the victory over the termites left the city at the mercy of the woodworms."
——HIDDEN CITIES 4
Key words (or metaphors):
Topic Explanation: 'The Fatal Conceit' was Hayek's last book, a systematic critique of socialism. The theme is named in response to that fanatical quest for rationality and the expert approach to urban governance.
Most representative sentence:
"The astronomers, after each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova's explosion, or a remote point in the firmament's change of colour from orange to yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way."
——CITIES & THE SKY 5
Key words (or metaphors):
Topic Explanation:Existentialism, a philosophical idea that focuses on the "I" to explore, pursue, solve and optimize everything in its life. Calvino's humanistic focus on urban renewal, as well as his focus on the individual, reflects this idea.
Most representative sentences:
"The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer."
—CITIES & DESIRE 4
Key words (or metaphors):
Topic Explanation:Calvino has a keen insight into the unbridled but blind pursuit of human desire in the present.
Most representative sentence:
"Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the betters."
——CITIES & MEMORY 2
Key words (or metaphors):
Unnamed topic
Most representative sentence:
"When you have forded the river, when you have crossed the mountain pass, you suddenly find before you the city of Moriana, its alabaster gates transparent in the sunlight, its coral columns supporting pediments encrusted with serpentine, its villas all of glass like aquariums where the shadows of dancing girls with silvery scales swim beneath the medusa-shaped chandeliers."
——CITIES & EYES 5
Unnamed topic
Most representative sentence:
"Cities have no name for me: they are places without leaves, separating one pasture from another, and where the goats are frightened at street corners and scatter."
——CONTINUOUS CITIES 4