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Reading Eco: An Anthology
"[READING ECO is a timely indication] of the fruitfulness of perceiving Eco as the same in his metamorphoses. [It also testifies] to a certain price that Eco and his readers must/may pay for the enormous pleasure and intellectual stimulus of being Eco and being with Eco." —The Comparatist Umberto Eco is, quite simply, a genius. He is a renowned medievalist, philosopher, novelist, a popular journalist, and linguist. He is as warm and witty as he is learned—and quite probably the best-known academic and novelist in the world today. The goal of this anthology is to examine his ideas of literary semiotics and interpretation as evidenced both in his scholarly work and in his fiction.
- GenresPhilosophy
512 pages, Hardcover
First published February 1, 1997
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July 23, 2017
Note: I only actually read the introduction and then the collected essays on The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum, since I don't study semiotics at a university level and frankly can't understand the writing on semiotics in here.
Though the general text of this book is a basically impenetrable dark body of over intellectual nonsense to the average person who is not approaching this book from a university background in semiotics, the sections on Eco's fictions are a little more legible. What they make clear is that no matter your background there is always more depth to Eco's work - always another reference, always another deeply hidden secret glinting in the darkness. The Name of the Rose uses it's setting in time to deliberately mislead academics reading it, as for instance when William of Occam quotes the famous 'standing on the shoulders of giants' saying that became widely known after Isaac Newton (centuries later) but was in fact first recorded many centuries prior to the novel's medieval setting. There were some interesting points made as regards gender in Eco's novels, and how though an entirely male novel seems reasonable in a monastic setting it is less well hidden in Foucault's Pendulum where women are nonetheless still given a back-seat position.
Difficult to read but it certainly has some interesting ideas and I hope that if (when) I read and re-read Eco's work some of those ideas will remain to enhance the experience.
Though the general text of this book is a basically impenetrable dark body of over intellectual nonsense to the average person who is not approaching this book from a university background in semiotics, the sections on Eco's fictions are a little more legible. What they make clear is that no matter your background there is always more depth to Eco's work - always another reference, always another deeply hidden secret glinting in the darkness. The Name of the Rose uses it's setting in time to deliberately mislead academics reading it, as for instance when William of Occam quotes the famous 'standing on the shoulders of giants' saying that became widely known after Isaac Newton (centuries later) but was in fact first recorded many centuries prior to the novel's medieval setting. There were some interesting points made as regards gender in Eco's novels, and how though an entirely male novel seems reasonable in a monastic setting it is less well hidden in Foucault's Pendulum where women are nonetheless still given a back-seat position.
Difficult to read but it certainly has some interesting ideas and I hope that if (when) I read and re-read Eco's work some of those ideas will remain to enhance the experience.
Displaying 1 of 1 review