Eco displays in these essays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucaultâ s Pendulum. His range is wide, and his insights are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Italo Calvino described a "deep-rooted tradition in Italian literature... the notion of the literary work as a map of the world and the knowable, of writing driven on by a thirst for knowledge that may in turns be theological, speculative, magical, encyclopaedic..." He was talking about Dante the visionary and Galileo the cosmographer, but he himself, and Umberto Eco, also work from the same im…
The limits of interpretation--what a text can actually be said to mean--are of double interest to a semiotician whose own novels' intriguing complexity has provoked his readers into intense speculation as to their meaning. Eco's illuminating and frequently hilarious discussion ranges from Dante to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all the hallmarks of …
Umberto Eco focuses here on what he once called "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"--that is, the belief that many interpreters have gone too far in their domination of texts, thereby destroying meaning and the basis for communication.