Six Walks In The Fictional Woods

In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader—his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O'Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval's Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.

In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader—his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O'Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval's Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.

This book provides a philosophical overview of Umberto Eco's historical and cultural development as a unique, internationally recognized public intellectual who communicates his ideas to both an academic and a popular audience. It describes Eco’s intellectual development from his childhood during World War II and student involvement as a Catholic youth activist and scholar of the Middle Ages, to his early writings on the "openness" of modern works such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Merrell also explores Eco’s pioneering role in semiotics and his later career as a novelist.

A posthumous collection of essays by one of our greatest contemporary thinkers that provides a towering vision of Western culture. In Umberto Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose, Nicholas of Morimondo laments, “We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!” To which the protagonist, William of Baskerville, replies: “We are dwarfs, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.” On the Shoulders of Giants is a collection of essays based on lectures Eco famously delivered at the Milanesiana Festival in Milan over the last fifteen years of his life. Previously unpublished, the essays explore themes he returned to again and again in his writing: the roots of Western culture and the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the potency of conspiracies, the lure of mysteries, and the imperfections of art. Eco examines the dynamics of creativity and considers how every act of innovation occurs in conversation with a superior ancestor. In these playful, witty, and breathtakingly erudite essays, we encounter an intellectual who reads comic strips, reflects on Heraclitus, Dante, and Rimbaud, listens to Carla Bruni, and watches Casablanca while thinking about Proust. On the Shoulders of Giants reveals both the humor and the colossal knowledge of a contemporary giant.

Ours is an age of offense, a time of reactionary shock--always received, never given. Ours is an age that has forgone cultural narratives, a time of individualism--wherein personal identities trump the collective spirit. Ours is an age of failing earth, a time of ecological collapse--yet the consumption of global capitalism continues to run amok. But don't fear. You have the correct worldview, the best solutions. It's not your fault these things are happening. It's the president's, the immigrant's, and the Islamicist's. Or perhaps It's the socialist's, the tree hugger's, and the baby killer's. But it's not your fault. Never yours. For the world exists as you see it--in an echo chamber lined with golden pixels. Do I still have your attention? Then join me. Within the covers of Narrativizing Theories, I dive into ambiguity and aesthetics to depict how clashing worldviews exist side by side yet remain mutually incompatible. I examine how cultures distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable beliefs, embodiments, and identities. And I outline an aesthetic theory of ambiguity that highlights--through the twists and turns of literature--the provisionality of knowledge and the narrativization of reality.

This book is significant for its concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its anticipation of two themes of literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interaction between reader and text.

Presents four theories describing the limits of literary interpretation, challenging "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" that diminishes the meaning and the basis of communication. -- Back cover.

The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) has become a leader in the dialogue between Jews and Catholics as was manifested in the role that the Jesuit Cardinal Augustin Bea played in the adoption by the Second Vatican Council of Nostra Aetate, the charter for that new relationship. Still the encounters between Jesuits and Jews were often characterized by animosity and this historical record made them a tragic couple, related but estranged. This volume is the first examination of the complex interactions between Jesuits and Jews from the early modern period in Europe and Asia through the twentieth century where special attention is focused on the historical context of the Holocaust.