Word: umbertos
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...Roland Barthes, Roman Jakobson, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, whose posthumous presence in the collection reflects how the "death of the authors" has ironically inaugurated a backward-looking era for cultural literacy. At the same time, Blonsky's exclusive salon is also visited by still-vital voices such as Umberto Eco, Fredric Jameson and Julia Kristeva. The result is a surprisingly accessible sourcebook on the fallout of postmodern self-expressionism that tries to rescue semiotics from exclusive appropriation by French aesthete-intellectuals and present its current practice as an applied science for decoding the loaded meanings of everyday situations...
...UMBERTO ECO scored big in 1983. The English translation of his The Name of the Rose appeared in the United States and was a phenomenal success. A mystery novel set in a 14th century Italian abbey, it entertainingly combined detailed scholarship and philosophic inquiry with the pace and plot of a top-notch potboiler. A book that succeeded on many levels. The Name of the Rose earned itself a rightful place on widely disparate shelves, from the pulp-novel racks at the A & P to the syllabus for Professor David Herlihy's History 31, Medieval Europe...
...Postscript to the Name of the Rose emerges as a sort of printed faculty dinner conversation with Umberto Eco. The slim volume costs $8.95, about double the price of the original's paperback edition. Still, that's a bell of a lot cheaper than flying to Italy to catch Professor Eco's office hours...
...gifts of toads and earthworms, to a modest clerk fresh from a one night stand, the characters of Difficult Loves scurry about their lives searching for human communication. Not a surprising theme for an author who has long been fascinated by the semiotic side of life. Like fellow Italian Umberto Eco, Calvino is as interested in how we mean something as in what we mean. In Calvino's world, a ship can show the truth like a book, and a pair of glasses can block recognition better than a wall...
...Humans are the only animals that know they have to laugh. And we laugh because we know we have to die. Well, it's a good way of spending the time in between." Author Umberto Eco, 52, has long contemplated the many kinds of laughter, including recently the all-the-way-to-the-bank kind. The awesome success of his medieval-monastery mystery, The Name of the Rose, has turned the scholarly Italian professor of semiotics into an international literary icon. During an autumn promotional tour of the U.S. last week, he delighted an audience of New York City...