Serendipities: Language & Lunacy

(Translated by Alastair McEwen.)

University of Toronto Press, 2000, ISBN: 0802035337; Hardcover $19.95.



Here is the description from the publisher:

Translation is not about comparing two languages, Umberto Eco argues, but about the interpretation of a text in two different languages, thus involving a shift between cultures. An author whose works have appeared in many languages, Eco is also the translator of Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie and Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style from French into Italian. In this book he draws on his substantial practical experience to identify and discuss some central problems of translation. As he convincingly demonstrates, a translation can express an evident deep sense of a text even when violating both lexical and referential faithfulness. Depicting translation as a semiotic task, he uses a wide range of source materials as illustration: the translations of his own and other novels, translations of the dialogue of American films into Italian, and various versions of the Bible. In the second part of his study he deals with translation theories proposed by Jakobson, Steiner, Peirce, and others.

Overall, Eco identifies the different types of interpretive acts that count as translation. An enticing new typology emerges, based on his insistence on a common-sense approach and the necessity of taking a critical stance.

You may read more about this work at the University of Toronto Press Web site.

The Search for the Perfect Language

Translated by James Fentress, Part of the “Making of Europe” Series.

1. Blackwell Publishers, 1995, ISBN 0-631-17465-6; Hardcover $52.95. Out of Print.
2. Blackwell Publishers, 1997, ISBN 0-631-20510-1; Paperback $26.95.




Part of the “Making of Europe” series edited by Jacques Le Goff. Here is the description from the book jacket:

The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of an idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture, and history.

From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophes of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence.

The story Umberto Eco tells ranges widely, from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes, and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the intimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes – one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the Serpent tempted Eve in French – have variously claimed their languages as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority.

To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European history.

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

1. Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-674-81050-3; Hardcover $19.95.
2. Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-674-81051-1; Paperback $14.00.




In this book, Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader - his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlet 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 came 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.

You may read more about this work at the Harvard University Press Web site.

Interpretation and Overinterpretation

Cambridge University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-521-42554-9; Paperback $23.00.



Originally a series lectures delivered in English at Cambridge University (for the same program that originated the “Six Walks” lectures below), Interpretation and Overinterpretation collects these under the editorship of Stefan Collini. It contains an introduction, Eco’s lectures, three papers responding to Eco’s arguments and a final response from Eco. Here the description from the back of the book:

Umberto Eco, international best-selling novelist and leading literary theorist, her brings together these two roles in a provocative discussion of the vexed question of literary interpretation. 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, from Foucault’s Pendulum to Chomsky and Derrida, and bears all the hallmarks of his inimitable personal style.

Three of the world’s leading figures in philosophy, literary theory and criticism take up the challenge of entering into debate with Eco on the question of interpretation. Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler and Christine Brooke-Rose each offer a distinctive perspective on this contentious topic, contributing to a unique exchange of ideas between some of the foremost and most exciting theorists in the field.

The chapters of the book are as follows:

Introduction: “Interpretation Terminable and Interminable,” by Stefan Collini
1. “Interpretation and History,” by Umberto Eco
2. “Overinterpreting Texts,” by Umberto Eco
3. “Between Author and Text,” by Umberto Eco
4. “The Pragmatist’s Progress,” by Richard Rorty
5. “In Defence of Overinterpretation,” by Jonathan Culler
6. “Palimpsest History,” by Christine Brooke-Rose
7. “Reply,” by Umberto Eco
Notes on the Contributors Index

You may read more about this work at the Cambridge University Press Web site.

The Limits of Interpretation

1. Indiana University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-253-31852-1; Hardcover $35.00. Out of print.
2. Indiana University Press, 1990, ISBN 0-253-20869-6; Paperback $17.95.



Originally published in 1990 as I limiti dell’interpretazione. Here is the publisher’s description:

In this new collection of essays, Eco focuses on what he calls the limits of interpretation, or, as he once noted in another context, “the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation.” Readers of Eco’s other work will find here all the ingredients with which they have become familiar–vast learning, an agile and exciting mind, good humor and a brilliance of insight

You can read review extracts at the Indiana University Press Web site.

Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages

Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN: 0-300-09304-7; Paperback $12.95.



Originally published in 1959 as Sviluppo dell’estetico medievale and revised in 1987 as Arte e bellezza nell’estetica medievale, this work was translated into English in 1985. In 2002, Yale University Press placed it back in print. Here is the description from the publisher:

In the first English translation of this authoritative, lively book, the celebrated Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco presents a learned summary of medieval aesthetic ideas. First published twenty years ago and now translated into English for the first time, the book juxtaposes theology and science, poetry and mysticism, in order to explore the relationship that existed between the aesthetic theories and the artistic experience and practice of medieval culture.

You may read more about this work at the Yale University Press Web site.

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas

(Translated by Hugh Bredin.)

Harvard University Press, 1988, ISBN 0-674-00676-3; Paperback $19.95.



Eco’s first book, this treatise on the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas was originally published in 1956 as Il problema estetico in San Tommaso and revised in 1970 for a second edition titled Il problema estetico in Thommaso d’Aquino, which also contained some material from Sviluppo dell’estetico medievale. It was translated into English in 1988 for Harvard UP.

Here is the introductory note from the back cover of the book:

The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses in this book to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and the developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas’s conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty – integrity, proportion, and clarity – that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete applications of these theories in Aquinas’s reflections on God, mankind, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas’s views on art and compares his poetics with Dante’s. In a new chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas’s aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas’s aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.

The chapters of the book are as follows:

Preface
Translator’s Note

I. Aesthetics in Medieval Culture
II. Beauty as a Transcendental
III. The Function of Nature of the Aesthetic Visio
IV. The Formal Criteria of Beauty
V. Concrete Problems and Applications
VI. The Theory of Art
VII. Judgment of the Aesthetic Visio
VIII. Conclusion

Notes
Bibliography
Glossary
Index

You may read more about this work at the Harvard University Press Web site.

Fiction: The Island of the Day Before

Translated by William Weaver

1. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995, ISBN 0-15-100151-0; Hardcover $25.00.
2. Harcourt Brace, 1984, ISBN 0-15-600131-4; Paperback $16.00.



Just as the style of Rose reflects the murky density of the late medieval period, and Foucault’s Pendulum reads like a paranoid romp through our fractured postmodern century, the narrative of Eco’s third book blossoms exquisitely outwards along numerous frills and ornamentations, a baroque construction rooted in the seventeenth century.
The Island of the Day Before, published in 1994 as L’isola del giorno prima, is the story of a man named Roberto, a chameleon-like and slightly eccentric Italian who finds himself shipwrecked, of all places, upon another ship. This abandoned vessel, the Daphne, is anchored near an island of stunning beauty; but Roberto is forced by his fear of the sun to avoid the daylight, devoting his time to exploring the strange vessel and penning melodramatic love letters to his “Lady.” During his reveries and periods of writing, he has the time to review his colorful life – his haunted childhood in Italy, his martial experience at the siege of Casale, his education in the decadent salons of Paris – a life to which he dearly wishes to return. But all is not lost; fortunately for Roberto, the ship provides a wealth of opportunities to stave off hunger and boredom, as it’s been thoughtfully equipped with a host of wonders from a room of clocks to an exotic aviary. Unfortunately for Roberto, however, the ship is less abandoned than he had initially thought. But who could this stranger be, this unseen Other who feeds the animals and reads Roberto’s journal while he sleeps? Is it his imaginary brother and evil double Ferrante? Is it another soul in search of the ultimate navigational secret? And just why was this unique craft abandoned anyway? What marvels await on the island?
This, Eco’s third novel, is yet another brilliant accomplishment. At heart, it is a tale of the seventeenth century, a dizzying time when science and reason were divorcing themselves from magic and superstition, when politics and religion were swirling with new currents, and the fires of Revolution and Enlightenment could be barely glimpsed in the distant mirrors of a Paris salon. Filled with a sense of ironic wonder and sly confidence, the story visits one remarkable character after another, allowing each to have their strutting say upon the stage of the narrative. Nature, Theology and Physics are discussed and virtually embodied by a lovable cast of wits and crackpots, lovers and scholars, inventors and inquisitors. All signs and signposts melt into an ambiguous stream of thought; languages are cobbled together as needed by bookish eccentrics, Aristotelian priests talk in Moral & Important Capitals, and the decadent wits destroy God and the State with their rapiers and epigrams, both equally pointed and deadly.
The story is told using a most ingenious framework: Eco (as the anonymous author) poses as the narrator, but he is merely reconstructing the original journal left behind by the quixotic Roberto. Taking this idea several steps farther than in The Name of the Rose, here Eco does not feel bound to faithfully duplicate the original manuscript. Like a modern Cervantes, he freely adapts his found text, offering his own commentary on how “we moderns” must look at certain situations in the novel, and occasionally chiding Roberto or offering amusing posthumous criticism. It is a wonderful idea, and it works extremely well, giving the story an inescapable glow of ironic humor.
Although The Island of the Day Before is more playful and lighthearted than Eco’s previous two novels, it is every bit as dense, serving as a cornucopia of unique images and intriguing ideas. The book is bursting with life, and again Eco makes his writing a platform for the discussion of language and philosophy; and by looking at the marvels and follies of the past with fresh and vigorous eyes, our own ideas and technology are given a new shine as well. Cleverly, Eco presents the science of the mid 1600s with all its “credibility” left intact, and spends many happy pages discussing the ramifications of arcane and esoteric geography, astronomy, physics, and chemistry. At a time when Galileo was only recently dead and Newton just an infant, Eco reaches into the playpen of now-discarded scientific ideas, taking a childlike delight in pulling out long forgotten concepts and investing them with a certain sense of authority, allowing them their place in the sun along with metaphysics and religion – indeed, often welding them indistinguishably together.

Nonfiction: History of Beauty

Translated by Alastair McEwen
Rizzoli International Publications, 2004, ISBN 0847826465; Hardcover $40.00.



An illustrated book, The History of Beauty represents Eco in cultural/historical critic mode. Additional commentary is planned for the future; this is from the publisher:

What is beauty? What is art? What is taste and fashion? Is beauty something to be observed coolly and rationally or is it something dangerously involving? So begins Umberto Eco’s intriguing journey into the aesthetics of beauty, in which he explores the ever-changing concept of the beautiful from the ancient Greeks to today. While closely examining the development of the visual arts and drawing on works of literature from each era, Eco broadens his enquiries to consider a range of concepts, including the idea of love, the unattainable woman, natural inspiration versus numeric formulas, and the continuing importance of ugliness, cruelty, and even the demonic.

Professor Eco takes us from classical antiquity to the present day, dispelling many preconceptions along the way and concluding that the relevance of his research is urgent because we live in an age of great reverence for beauty, “an orgy of tolerance, the total syncretism and the absolute and unstoppable polytheism of Beauty.”

In this, his first illustrated book, Professor Eco offers a layered approach that includes a running narrative, abundant examples of painting and sculpture, and excerpts from writers and philosophers of each age, plus comparative tables. A true road map to the idea of beauty for any reader who wishes to journey into this wonderful realm with Eco’s nimble mind as guide.

Nonfiction: Five Moral Pieces

Published by Harcourt, this volume contains five essays on themes of ethics and morality. According to Michael Spinella of Booklist:

Here Eco tackles difficult subjects with apparent ease in essays that, dealing with morality and ethics, touch every area of modern thought. His “Reflections on War,” written at the beginning of the Persian Gulf crisis, still resounds truthfully today. “On the Press” looks at the media and their influence on the world and one another. “Ur-Fascism” discusses the fascist regimes of Franco, Mussolini, and the Nazis, ending with the caveat that fascism, with its resurgence in the guise of militant new right-wing groups, isn’t at all a thing of the past. Through these and the other essays, Eco combines reflections on our shared history and his recommendations for a more favorable modernity in a manner that seems indisputable and brilliant.

Porta Ludovica reviewed this book upon publication – you may read the full review here.

Nonfiction: Kant and the Platypus

Published by Harcourt Brace, this work – the English translation of 1997’s Kant e l’ornitorinco – is another collection of essays revolving around semiotics and philosophy. The publisher’s description is as follows:

How do we know that a cat is a cat? Why do we agree on calling the beast a cat? Interesting questions, but an even more intriguing question lies at the heart of all modern philosophy – how much of our perception of things depends on our cognitive ability and how much on linguistic resources? At this point semiotics becomes inextricably linked to epistemology, or cognition. In these essays, Umberto Eco explores in depth such subjects as perception, the relationship between language and experience, and iconism that he only touched on in A Theory of Semiotics. Forgoing a formal, systematic treatment, Eco engages in a series of explorations based on common sense, from which flow an abundance of illustrative fables, often with animals as protagonists. Among the characters, a position of prominence is reserved for the platypus, which appears to have been created specifically to “put the cat among the pigeons” as far as many theories of knowledge are concerned. In Kant and the Platypus, Eco shares with us a wealth of ideas at once philosophical and amusing.

David Hornbuckle reviews the book for The Modern Word:
In Kant and the Platypus, Eco reiterates and updates much of the research that he published in 1976 as A Theory of Semiotics. Platypus is marketed as a general interest book, but the content presumes of the reader a fairly intimate knowledge of philosophy of language and complex logic, particularly certain writings of Kant, Heidegger and Peirce, which, more than one pundit has noted, almost nobody understands. Eco himself has even been reported as commenting on the difficulty of reading this book warning, “Don’t buy it if you are not Einstein.” To make things more difficult, or perhaps as a strategy of intimidation, Eco uses Latin, Italian, French and German quotations liberally with no translation whatsoever.
The essential subject matter of the book is the relationship between the things we perceive and the words we use to communicate about those things, name them, and describe them. Eco suggests a number of categories of meaning based largely on a language user’s linguistic competence, cultural background and technical expertise, and he illustrates this theory with a number of colorful and charming anecdotes, many borrowed or extended from other philosophers.
The title comes from an analogy Eco uses throughout the book, postulating a problem that Kant might have had in classifying a platypus had he ever come across one in his lifetime. The problem, specifically, is a bit unclear. Eco is a fine writer and certainly well-read, but his interpretations of other philosophers are sometimes suspect. Even so, the points he wishes to illustrate tend to boil down to plain common sense for the most part.
Some readers might be irritated by Eco’s frequent references to his own previous work as well as references to his skirmishes with various other philosophers over the years. However, fans of Eco’s fiction and lighter essays will still appreciate the playful humor and broad eclectic knowledge displayed in his writing, provided they can follow the subject matter being discussed. (DH)

Postscript to The Name of the Rose

An essay written about his first novel, Postille a Il nome della rosa had its first incarnation as a lengthy journal article. It was later retitled Reflections on The Name of the Rose and bound in a small illustrated book; but recently it has regained its original name and is included in the “Harvest in Translation” paperback edition of The Name of the Rose. The essay explores the role of the reader in approaching the text, and it gives some amusing and informative anectdotes on the actual writing of the novel, shedding much light on Eco’s creative process.
Here is some commentary about the original work, sent in by Jonathan Key:

A wonderful little book. Eco even talks about the different types of labyrinth. There are also some neat illustrations, particularly of the labyrinth on the floor of the cathedral at Rheims, which is the basis for the library in the novel. It appeared on the jacket of the original Italian hardback, and on various other editions (e.g. embossed on the Russian hardback). Part of its appeal for Eco, I’m sure, is that it was obliterated by a Canon in the 18th century. It is thus sous rature as Derrida would have it, under erasure – necessarily destroyed but nevertheless still visible and usable. It is a classical maze, surprisingly, rather than a mannerist one. The library in the novel is essentially mannerist (in that the ultimate goal is the finis africae), and both types become superceded by the rhizomatic model of Deleuze and Guattari in Rose. So, the Rheims labyrinth has only one route. As Eco (or his editor) put it: “But if you unravel the classical labyrinth, you find a thread in your hand, the thread of Ariadne. The classical labyrinth is the Ariadne’s-thread of itself.” (p.57) This reminds me of the final exchange between Lönnrot and Red Scharlach in Borges’ “Death and the Compass,” which, of course, was a major plot source for Rose. Interestingly, while in the novel William uses mathematical analysis to solve the mannerist maze, the film has Adso solving it by use of an Ariadne’s thread. Eco’s comment would seem to associate the thread solution exclusively with the ’classical’ maze but this is misleading. ’Classical’ labyrinths were usually pictorial, like Celtic ones, and you certainly wouldn’t need a thread to find your way out – you just keep going. The minatour’s maze would have to be mannerist, with lots of dead ends, despite what Eco says. Hence the need for a thread. Besides, I’ve seen Knossos, and it is beatifully labyrinthine, with lots of steps, little corridors, sudden changes in direction, and poky little rooms. Mannnerist, for sure.

Nonfiction: Travels in Hyperreality

Translated by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986, ISBN 0-15-691321-6; Paperback $15.00.



Travels in Hyperreality is a conglomeration of essays from previous works and columns. It is mostly based on 1983’s Sette anni di desiderio: chronache 1977 - 1983 (Seven Year’s of Desire), which is a collection of essays written about Italian political unrest, leading to a “religiosity of the unconscious, of the vortex, of the absence of a center, or radical difference, of absolute otherness, of fracture.” Hyperreality, however, includes several other essays taken from the earlier untranslated works Il costume di casa (1973) and Dalla periferia dell’Impero (1977) as well as a 1975 essay on the American subculture of hyperrealism called “Faith in Fakes.” This essay, retitled “Travels in Hyperreality,” is the longest work in the book, and provides the collection with a new name.
Obviously most of the essays concern themselves with modern culture and the currents and trends that helped to shape it, which allows Eco a platform to analyze such things as the media and the “global village” concept; but more than a few essays revolve around some of Eco’s favorite topics such as Aquinas and semiotics. In short, the range of topics is broad and eclectic as usual. The title essay tracks Eco as he journeys through American wax museums and theme parks in search of the American Ideal, commenting on the American fondness for kitsch and “authentic copies” in the absence of a profound historical tradition. Other subjects include a shrewd analysis of MacLuhan’s “the medium is the message” slogan, an irascible but thoughtful diatribe against spectator sports, a modern refutation of the ideology of the “romantic” terrorist, an analysis of the movie Casablanca as a cult phenomena laden with archetypes, and a series of essays which expostulate that our modern love of certain images and systems is a sort of “return to the Middle Ages.”
Many of the essays are actually quite humorous as well as insightful, and as usual Eco manages to serve up his ideas through a witty use of satirical analysis and overinterpretation coupled with a sly sense of irreverent and occasionally backhanded humor. The barbs are well fashioned, the commentary suitably wry, and the theory well-explained. A superior collection that certainly rewards a careful reading and a thoughtful re-reading.
Here is the introductory note from back cover:

Umberto Eco – novelist, semiotician, and cultural critic extraordinary – displays here the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco’s range is wide – from pop culture to philosophy, from the People’s Temple to Thomas Aquinas, from Casablanca to Roland Barthes.

The opening essay shows us the tireless and questing author travelling the length and breadth of America in search of places that probe the boundaries of realism, copies that promise more than the originals: wax museums, halls of fame, theme parks, zoos. “The Return of the Middle Ages” asks searching questions about our modernity; “The Global Village” moves from mass media to mass sports. Small gems abound, like “Lumbar Thought,” in which Eco considers how blue jeans shape the man.

The insights in these essays are acute, frequently ironic, and often downright funny. To quote the San Francisco Chronicle, Eco has “a great deal to teach all of us about the importance (not to mention the pleasure) of observation and criticism, those twin privileges – and, as he says, duties – of all thinking human beings.”

Nonfiction: Apocalypse Postponed

Edited by Robert Lumley
Indiana University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-253-31851-3; Hardcover $29.95. Out of print.



Originally published in 1964 as Apocalittici e integrati and revised in 1977. From Kirkus Reviews:

Teacher (Semiotics/Univ. of Bologna), editor, cultural commentator, and novelist (Foucault’s Pendulum, 1989), Eco offers refreshing commentary on cultural life, primarily in Italy, from the mid-1960s to the late ’80s, when intellectuals were especially alarmed by the emergence of a mass or pop culture. Dedicating his book to those he calls the “apocalyptics,’’ cultural elites who fear the destruction of their world by mass communication and popular entertainment, he offers historical surveys of key terms such as “culture,’’ “intellectual,’’ and “design,’’ bringing to these terms more inclusive definitions that embrace comic books, TV, popular music, and a whole range of experience that he includes in the idea of civilization. He recalls introducing his collection of Superman comics at a distinguished European conference of theologians and philosophers discussing mythography; republishes his famous essay from the New York Review of Books on Peanuts (the “microcosm,’’ the “primitive epic’’) for “humanists who do not read comic strips’’; and to prove that “the medium is not always the message,’’ he analyzes the official comic strips of the Chinese communist government. In lucid, persuasive, and artfully illustrated essays, Eco expands the range of what is acceptable as culture: television programs, computers, popular music, posters, the whole counterculture, anything that does not require paper made from trees, for, he concludes in a typically gnomic remark, “every new book reduces the quantity of oxygen.’’ Although Eco occasionally sounds foreign and anachronistic, he displays a universal sympathy and a comprehensive eye that ranges from Snoopy, who has “no hope of promotion,’’ to the “Genius Industry’’ – those poor eccentrics who believe themselves to be victims of their own originality, publishing and reviewing their own books. Eco is a true original – substantial, lucid, humane, and a great deal of fun. (Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP.)

The following description has been reprinted from the back of the Flamingo edition of Apocalypse Postponed:

Apocalypse Postponed is the anguished portrait of Western culture on the brink of self-destruction, by one of the world’s foremost writers.

With consummate ease, Umberto Eco provides simultaneously both a perfect attack on and an apology for mass culture. Exploring such exotica as La Ciccilina, Charlie Brown, George Orwell, Fellini, Chinese and American comics, as well as appraising illiteracy, the state of counterculture and his own reaction to the media’s consumption of his work, he exposes contemporary mass culture both as mankind’s nemesis and its salvation.

The introduction explains that the essays have been chosen with these objectives:

1. To convey some sense of the development of Eco’s writing on cultural issues from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, documenting as well as re-presenting past works.
2. To focus on journalism and occasional essays.
3. To include historically significant pieces not previously translated (notably from Apocalittici e integrati).
4. To include material written about Italy and for Italians and which has tended not to be translated for that reason.
5. To communicate the wit and brio of Eco’s writing.

And finally, here’s the Table of Contents with some information on the various essays:



Contents
Part 1; Mass Culture: Apocalypse Postponed
1. Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals: Mass communications and theories of mass culture [1964]
2. The World of Charlie Brown
3. Reactions of Apocalyptical and Integrated Intellectuals: Then (1964)
4. Reactions of the Author: Now (1974 and 1977)
5. Orwell, or Concerning Visonary Power
6. The Future of Literacy [1987]

Part 2: Mass Media and the Limits of Communication
1. Political Language: The use and abuse of rhetoric [1973]
2. Does the Audience have Bad Effects on Television? [1977]
3. Event as Mise en scene and Life as Scene-settings [1982]
4. The Phantom of Neo-TV: The debate on Fellini’s Ginger and Fred [1986]

Part 3: The Rise and Fall of Counter-cultures
1. Does Counter-culture Exist? [1983]
2. The New Forms of Expression [1973]
3. On Chinese Comic Strips: Counter-information and alternative
information [1971]
4. Independent Radio in Italy [1978]
5. Striking at the Heart of State?

Part 4: In Search of Italian Genius
1. Phenomena of This Sort Must Also be Included [1982]
1. Phenomena of This Sort Must Also be Included in Any Panorama of Italian Design [1982]
2. A Dollar for a Deputy: La Cicciolina [1987]
3. For Grace Received [1970]
4. The Italian Genius Industry [1973]

Porta Ludovica thanks Mark Brown and Guy S. Kaiser for some of this information. Guy also remarks, “Look for the early (first?) apperance of De Gubernatis in the last essay, the model for Manutius.”

Nonfiction: Misreadings

Translated by William Weaver
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1993, ISBN 0-15-660752-2; Paperback $14.00.



Originally published in 1963 as Diario minimo and revised in 1975, this small book is a collection of writings culled from Eco’s monthly column in the Italian literary magazine Il Verri. The writings are essentially freewheeling and experimental pieces, most of them taking humorous swings at literary theory, anthropology, and cultural biases. The English translation was made in 1993 and contains a special preface which explains the background to some of the pieces.
Misreadings is a perfect name for this delightful little book, as it captures the spirit of many of the essays, in which an entirely misappropriate spin is placed on familiar subjects. Sacred cows are irreverently speared and offered up for dinner, overinterpretation and ivory tower intellectualism are toppled down and mischievously dragged through the dust of the “real world,” and parodies are allowed to expand to their most pompous and ludicrous horizons. Modern literary criticism is applied to classics like the Bible and Dante, banknotes and currency are evaluated for their artistic value, and the modern media is depicted covering such events as the voyage of Columbus. Eco deftly and humorously points out that for all our art, criticism, and science, we as human beings are still terribly limited in our understanding of each other and the world we create around us.
Here is the blurb from the inside cover:

In an upside-down Lolita, Umberto Umberto pursues a granny with “whitely lascivious locks.” Professor Anouk Ooma of Price Joseph’s Land University addresses his colleagues on recent archeological findings that shed light on the poetry of Italy before the explosion. Columbus’s landing in the New World is covered by television reporters, commentators, and guest experts. In addition, we are given a social and structural analysis of the art of striptease as performed by Lilly Niagara of the Crazy Horse; we are privy to in-house publisher reader’s reports, most of them unfavorable, on such submissions as The Odyssey, Don Quixote, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and the Five Books of Moses; and we hear a diatribe against the mounting tide of vulgarity in Greece, the new democratic “culture industry” of such upstarts as Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, not to mention public playing of the flute.

Umberto Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way has some penetrating comments to make about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art and criticism.

This is a very enjoyable book, and it furnished the name for this web page as well – Porta Ludovica, from an essay that declared the impossibility of its existence in Milan.