IN A FEW WORDS AND POINTS- UMBERTO ECO

UMBERTO ECO- A STUDY 


  • Umberto Eco( 1932-2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor.
  • He is best known for his 1980 internationally acclaimed historical murder mystery novel, The Name of the Rose.
    •  The work combines semiotics, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.

        NOVELIST 

  1. THE NAME OF THE ROSE (1980)
    • Debut novel
    • Setting: Italian monastery, in the year 1327
    • Protagonist: Francisian friar William of Baskerville
    • Narrator: Adso of Melk
    • It was translated into English by William Weaver in 1983 including Foucault's Pendulum
      2. FOUCAULT'S PENDULUM (1988)
    • The pendulum of the title refers to an actual pendulum designed by French Physicist Leon Foucault to show earth's rotation.
    • The satirical novel has reference to ' conspiracy theory'.
    • Characters: Three vanity press employees ( Belbo, Diotallevi, and Casaubon)
    • The three invent their own 'conspiracy theory', The Plan and become increasingly obsessed with it forgetting that it is just a game. 
    • Later, The Plan becomes a target of other conspiracy theorists and real secret society- Knights Templar 

3. THE PRAGUE CEMETRY (2010)

    •  Translated by Richard Dixon in English.
    •  Main character: Simone Simonimi
    • He works for the Piedmont Government secret service
    • It has the theme of antisemitism. 

 
         PHILOSOPHER

  • He entered the University of Turin to take up medieval philosophy and literature. Upon writing his thesis on  Thomas Acquinas, he earned Laurea degree in philosophy in 1954.
    • His degree in philosophy paved way for The Development of Medieval Aesthetics.

       LITERARY CRITIC AND SEMIOTICS

  • Eco argued, in his " The Open Work",  that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning. The literary texts are open engaging fields in contrast to the closed text which are least rewarding.
  • Eco developed interpretative semiotics and his concept is elaborated in The Absent Structure(1968), A Theory of Semiotics (1975), and such others. 


Comments

  1. Ananya4 August 2020 at 13:01

    Umberto Eco in a nutshell. Thank you for this rich yet crisp writeup.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

THE MANY RAMAYANAS FOR AN UNPREJUDICED MIND

Image
P aula Richman, William H Danforth professor of South Asian Religions at Oberlin, Ohio, specialises in the study of Ramayana and Tamil. In her lecture ' Crossing Boundaries- Narratives and Persons Who Travel' at Delhi-based South Asian University, she spoke on stories travelling across borders over the centuries.    Speaking of the journey of a story or text across borders, she cited how Ramayana has taken "different forms, where stories are not only translated but retold, with each poet retelling it in a local context." She said various cultures have emphasised different "morals" from it.  Richman's 1991 book, ' Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia ', had to face criticism from Hindu activists for including inappropriate interpretations of the holy text. An essay by historian AK Ramanujan titled, ' Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and three thoughts on translations ', which detailed several interpret
Read more

IN A FEW WORDS AND POINTS- THE MIXED BAG

Image
TOPICS Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow The Bluest Eye Beloved Thomas Love Peacock William Hazlitt Philosophers, Thinkers and Reformers( Romantic Age) 1) TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW Famous soliloquy in Shakespeare's Macbeth. Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28 Macbeth delivers this soliloquy in response to Lady Macbeth's death   2) THE BLUEST EYE   Written by Toni Morrison in 1970 The novel is set in 1941 in the backdrop of the Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio Centres around the life of a young African-American girl named Pecola who is constantly called ugly due to her dark skin colour leading to the wish for blue eyes. Narration- Claudia MacTeer and a third-person narrator Drunk Cholly, Pecola's father rapes her. Pecola's child dies prematurely leading to her insanity Due to controversial topics, there had been numerous attempts to ban the book   3) BELOVED   Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Setting- Ame
Read more

THE LITERARY CANON: AN OVERVIEW

Image
THE LITERARY CANON: AN OVERVIEW Defining canon? The word  canon comes from the Greek word Kanon, meaning a measuring rod or standard. Now, the literary works that have achieved the status of classics, i.e of lasting quality and timeless worth are clubbed under the literary canon.  Oh! What's classics?  Classics are an outstanding example of timeless worth and lasting quality. It was first used by the 2nd-century Roman writer Aulus Gellius. It is said that Aulus in the miscellany Noctes Atticae place writers as classics scriptor , non preletarius ( " A distinguished, not a commonplace writer"). Now, this kind of classification began with the Greeks! The ranking of their cultural works appeared with the word canon. A canon could be a body of work representing high culture: be it literature, music or philosophy. Now, in literature, if you ask, we have influential works from every continent. Continent, you say! Well, some classics precede the coinage of the word 'con
Read more