Reading Eco

Description

A high-level introduction to the writing and thought of Umberto Eco.

"[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.

Sujets

• Literary Criticism
• PHILOSOPHY
• Criticism
• General officer
• Literary theory
• Theory
• Semiotics
• General
• Continental
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 22 février 1997
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253112828
• Langue: English

Extrait

Reading Eco
Advances in Semiotics
Thomas A. Sebeok, General Editor
Reading Eco
An Anthology
edited by Rocco Capozzi
Indiana University Press Bloomington and Indianapolis
© 1997 by Indiana University Press
All Rights Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American Universty Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information for this work is available from the Library of Congress.
1   2   3   4   5      02   01   00   99   98   97
To Adriana,
Chiana, Mara, Toni
and Truffle
 
Contents
F OREWORD
Thomas A. Sebeok
 
P REFACE
Rocco Capozzi
An introduction to Umberto Eco
 
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
 
P ART I.   R EADING E CO
 
1.1 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
1.2 Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and Post-Modern Aesthetics
1.3 Two Problems in Textual Interpretation
1.4 Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture
1.5 An Author and his Interpreters
 
P ART II.   R EADINGS ON ECO . A P RETEXT TO L ITERARY S EMIOTICS AND I NTERPRETATION
 
2.1 Davis Seed The
Open Work in Theory and Practice
2.2 John Deely
Looking back on A Theory of Semiotics
2.3 Lubomir Doležel
The Themata of Eco’s Semiotics of Literature
2.4 Susan Petrilli
Towards Interpretation Semiotics
2.5 Irmengard Rauch
Openness, Eco, and the End of Another Millennium
2.6 Victorino Tejera
Eco, Peirce and the Necessity of Interpretation
2.7 Hanna Buczynska-Garewicz
Semiotics and Deconstruction
2.8 Michael Riffaterre
The Interpreant in Literary Semiotics
2.9 Paul Perron and Patrick Debbèche
On Truth and Lying: U. Eco and A.J. Greimas
2.10 Roberta Kevelson
Eco and Dramatology
2.11 Anna Longoni
Esoteric Conspiracies and the Interpretative Strategy
2.12 Rocco Capozzi
Interpretation and Overinterpretation . The rights of texts, readers and implied authors
 
P ART III.   R EADING E GO ’s P OSSIBLE W ORLDS
 
3a. The Name of the Rose
3.1 Teresa De Lauretis
Gaudy Rose: Eco and Narcissism
3.2 David H. Richter
The Mirrored World: Form and Ideology in The Name of the Rose
3.3 Thomas Sebeok
Give Me Another Horse
 
3b. Foucault’s Pendulum
3.4 Peter Bondanella
Interpretation, Overinterpretation, Paranoid Interpretation and Foucault’s Pendulum
3.5 Theresa Coletti
Bellydancing: Gender, Silence, and the Women of Foucault’s Pendulum
3.6 Linda Hutcheon
Irony-clad Foucault
3.7 Lois Parkinson
Zamora The Swing of the ‘Pendulum’: Eco’s Novels
 
3c. The Island of the Day Before
3.8 Norma Bouchard
Whose ‘Excess of Wonder’ Is it Anyway? Reading Eco’s Tangle of Hermetic and Pragmatic Semiosis in The Island of the Day Before
3.9 Claudia Miranda
“Dove” is the Dove?
3.10 Rocco Capozzi
Intertextuality, Metaphors and Metafiction as Cognitive Strategies in The Island of the Day Before
 
P ART IV. R EFERENCES
 
4.1 Notes
4.2 Integrated Bibliography
4.3 Contributors
Foreword Thomas A. Sebeok
At the peak of Summer in 1981, I land in Rome from overseas. For the first time, I glimpse Il nome delta rosa , by my long-time friend and semiotic comrade-in-arms, Umberto Eco, published a few months earlier, displayed wherever books are sold. I buy a copy–“Naturalmente, un manoscritto”– prove the resonance of its Old Testament beginnings, then continue browsing at my hotel, wide-eyed from jet lag, late into the night. I finish reading the novel during sleepless times to follow in the course of a dozen train-rides up and down Italy and nights in hotels, until I reach “stat rosa pristine nomine, nomina nude tenemus.”
Eventually, I alight in the resort town of Rimini and call up the Ecos from the railway station at their manor nestled inland from the seaside in the region of Alto Montefeltro. Renate answers the phone and tells me to have some refreshments at the station’s restaurant while waiting for Umberto to pick me up. He arrives and drives me to their home. I tell him that I have been nibbling away at his first novel all week long, but he questions whether I can read Italian well enough. As a matter of fact, although out of practice now, I had, as a pre-teen, spent many a holiday in my father’s villa in Abbazia (now Opatija) on the Adriatic, and had formally studied Italian for years in the 1930’s in an Ujpest gymnasium. In 1936, I was even awarded a medal for my efforts on Benito Mussolini’s behalf by Italy’s Ambassador to Hungary. Many decades later, while I stopped by to lecture at a North Italian university, my host, whom I recognized as the former Ambassador, now serving as the Professor of Glottology as well as the Rector, needed reminding of our earlier encounter. “Sh,” he whispered, “not so loud”!
I ask Umberto to autograph my copy, which he inscribes: “Ad mentem divi Tom, sherlockly...” In retrospect, two years afterwards, this last tag becomes emblematic of our book on Dupin, Holmes, and Peirce co-authored, co-edited, and co-published in our respective habitats, Milano and Bloomington, as Il segno dei tre (Bompiani) and The Sign of Three (Indiana University Press).
Surprisingly early next morning after my arrival, the phone rings at the villa. The aged President Alessandro Pertini is on line to congratulate Eco once more for his novel having won the Premio Strega not long before. (The Premio Anghiari, Premio I1 Libro dell’anno, and, eventually, the Premio Viareggio, were all to come later, and the phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.) Amidst Presidential felicitations, the line goes dead, but sounds again a few minutes afterwards. I hear Eco shouting (he always roars into the receiver): “You see Mr. President, nothing in Italy works!”
To the public at large, Eco is of course known as the author of three hugely successful novels. Today, his mythical stature as a writer of fiction overshadows his scholarly pre-eminence, but to me, and to most colleagues in our profession, he remains one of the most original and creative contributors to semiotics. Ever constant to our métier, he was quoted in a recent New York Times interview as claiming: “I think semiotics is the only form philosophy can take in the present century.” Needless to say, I count myself among those who agree with him, although I tend to regard the last phrase (possibly supplied by a credulous interlocutor) needlessly restrictive.
The omnivorous range of his ceaselessly roving intelligence over far-reaching epochs–especially the twelfth to fourteenth centuries of his Latinate mythopoeic imagination–vast spaces, including a chimerical seventeenth century South Pacific, and an astonishing variety of topics, Ancient and Modern, brings to mind Dr. Johnson’s couplet that could serve as Eco’s motto: “Let observation with extensive view / Survey mankind, from China to Pern.” The essays assembled even in this, Rocco Capozzi’s hefty, well-informed book ventilate a mere fraction of his oeuvre to date. And he is, after all, still a productive “medievalist in hibernation” (as he likes to designate himself), with many spring tides in his (to be hoped for) smokeless future.
An admirable, if to some readers minor genre, at which Eco is adept but which is seldom noted in commentaries on the rest of his dazzling work, is exemplified by his many Forewords, Prefaces, Introductions, Commemorations, Palimpsests, and comparably pithy prose pieces, familiar perhaps only to those to whom they matter the most and those who are immersed in the local circumstances. This sort of venture is represented in this volume only by a single item, Eco’s perspicacious presentation, in 1990, of three of Yuri Lotman’s important articles, including his now classic “The Semiosphere,” translated from Russian into English by Ann Shukman. (Key early works by several principal “Soviet” semioticians of the famous Moscow-Tartu School were made accessible to Western readers for probably the first time in a 1969 Italian collection Eco himself had co-edited with R. Faccani.)
The Russian master had been a Vice-President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS) from its founding in 1969 to his death in the Fall of 1993. And so was Roman Jakobson (d. 1982). What could therefore be more appropriate than for Eco, a co-founder and since 1994 an Honorary President of the same Association, to have constructed another of his invaluable assessments of a senior colleague–one could say, of another elder of the same extended semiotics tribe -titled “The Influence of Roman Jakobson on the Development of Semiotics” (originally published in 1977, then reprinted in a 1987 volume of Classics in Semiotics )? It was there that Eco initially proclaimed his thesis that “the entire history of philosophy could be re-read in a semiotic perspective,” then going