Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture

ISBN-13: 9780521442008 / Angielski / Twarda / 1997 / 236 str.

Peter Bondanella

Opis

Umberto Eco is known among academics for his literary and cultural theories, and to an enormous international audience through his novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. Peter Bondanella offers the first comprehensive study in English of Eco's works. In clear and accessible language, he traces the development of Eco's interests, from medieval aesthetics to semiotics to popular culture, and shows how Eco's own fiction grows out of his literary and cultural theories. Bondanella also provides a full bibliography of works by and about Eco, arguably the most famous Italian writer since Dante.

Recenzje

"Bondanella's book amounts to a masterful sketch of Italian and Western intellectual history from the early 1950's to the present." The Comparatist

Spis treści

1. Umberto Eco's intellectual origins: medieval aesthetics, publishing and mass media; 2. The open work, misreadings, and modernist aesthetics; 3. Cultural theory and popular culture: from structuralism to semiotics; 4. From semiotics to narrative theory in a decade of radical social change; 5. 'To make truth laugh': postmodern theory and practice in The Name of the Rose; 6. Interpretation, overinterpretation, paranoid interpretation, and Foucault's Pendulum; 7. Inferential strolls and narrative shipwrecks: Six Walks and The Island of the Day Before; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography.