Umberto Eco
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"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,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
In this prescient essay collection, the acclaimed author of Foucault's Pendulum examines the cultural trends and perils at the dawn of the 21st century. In the last decade of the 20th century, Umberto Eco saw an urgent need to embrace tolerance and multiculturalism in the face of our world's ever-increasing interconnectivity. At a talk delivered during the first Gulf War, he points out the absurdity of armed conflict in a globalized economy where...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"On the Shoulders of Giants collects previously unpublished essays from the last fifteen years of Umberto Eco's life. With humor and erudition, one of the great contemporary thinkers takes on the roots of Western culture, the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the imperfections of art, and the lure of mysteries"--
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." -Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
" . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship . . . raises many fascinating questions." -Language in Society
" . . . a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." -Robert Scholes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art...
Author
Language
English
Description
Collected here are some of Umberto Eco's finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: "In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some 'signs.' These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behavior, political acts, artificial landscapes." From Disneyland to...
Author
Language
English
Description
Inventing the Enemy covers a wide range of topics on which Eco has written and lectured over the past ten years: from a disquisition on the theme that runs through his recent novel The Prague Cemetery - every country needs an enemy, and if it doesn't have one, must invent it - to a discussion of ideas that have inspired his earlier novels (and in the process he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world); from...
Author
Series
Language
English
Description
Once a columnist for an Italian literary magazine, Eco now shares his acute and highly entertaining sense of the absurd in modern life in these essays about militarism, computerese, cowboy and Indian movies, art criticism, librarians, semiotics, and much more--including himself.
Author
Language
English
Description
By the time Umberto Eco published his best-selling novel The Name of the Rose, he was one of Italy's most celebrated intellectuals, a distinguished academic and the author of influential works on semiotics. Some years before that, in 1977, Eco published a little book for his students, How to Write a Thesis, in which he offered useful advice on all the steps involved in researching and writing a thesis -- from choosing a topic to organizing a work...
Author
Publisher
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers
Pub. Date
[1986]
Language
English
Description
By the author of The Name of the Rose, these essays, written over the last 20 years and culled from newspapers and magazines, explore the rag-bag of modern consciousness. Eco considers a wide range of topics, from Superman and Casablanca, Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni, Jim Jones and mass suicide, and Woody Allen, to holography and waxworks, pop festivals and football, and not least the social and personal implications of tight jeans....
Author
Series
Publisher
Harcourt, Brace
Pub. Date
[1994]
Language
English
Description
How to Travel with a Salmon is a highly engaging collection of what Umberto Eco calls his diario minimo - minimal diaries - after the magazine column in which he began "pursuing the pathways of parody." These essays, written in the late eighties and early nineties, are his playful but unfailingly accurate takes on militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, art criticism, librarians, bureaucrats, meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, maniacal...
Author
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Pub. Date
1992.
Language
English
Description
Umberto Eco, international best-selling novelist and leading literary theorist, here 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...