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

by Peter Bondanella

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521020879
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/20/2005
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	5.47(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.71(d)

Table of Contents

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.

Editorial Reviews

"Peter Bondanella's Umberto Eco and the Open Text, an extremely intelligent, well-researched monograph and the most lucid study on Umberto Eco to date, was certainly well worth the wait. Peter Bondanella's study of Umberto Eco is a invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate one of the wittiest and most erudite, intelligent, and entertaining intellectuals of our time." Rocco Capozzi, World Literature Today

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

From the Publisher