Customer Reviews

On Literature

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is worth buying for Eco's essay on "The Power of Falsehood" in which he explores the history and impact of the myth of the flat earth, of Prester John's kingdom, and the long and complex background to the lies of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion"
If you've read any Eco (or Dante or Borges or Wilde) there is a lot here for you. There is also a striking essay (originally presented at Columbia University in 1980)entitled "The American Myth in Three Anti-American Generations" that focuses on the generation that came of age in Mussolini's Italy in the 1930's and 1940's. The section on the journals on resistance fighter Giaime Pintor -- with extensive selections quoted-- is powerful. The background on origins of European left-wing attitudes toward aspects of America are quite insightful.

This collection of essays and lectures by Umberto Eco and translated by Martin McLaughlin contains Eco's reflections on several aspects of literature, from the (more or less) tangible influence of Borges on the author's own writing to different approaches to literary criticism to how he himself came to write his novels. Though the essays themselves range in subject matter, all contain the underlying currents of Eco's academic forte, semiotics, that difficult-to-define discipline that drives the author's intellect.

The eighteen essays/lectures concentrate on specific authors and works ("A Reading of the Paradiso", "Wilde: Paradox and Aphorism") as well as on more general topics ("On Symbolism", "Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading"). As you might gather from the titles, this book is not light reading and reflects not only the density of Eco's prose but also of his ideas. Some essays succeed better than others. "Borges and My Anxiety of Influence" is a fascinating, almost conversational glimpse into the workings of Eco's literary mind while his more direct "How I Write" is deadened by self-analysis. "The Power of Falsehood", perhaps more than any of these essays, exposes the obsessions that gave rise to The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, and Baudolino; it delves into the marriage of history and false ideas. Unfortunately, the opening piece, "On Some Functions of Literature," seems almost elemental and not deep enough for someone of Eco's academic caliber. Readers of his novels will recognize in many of these essays the driving force behind the fiction. Intellectuals and literary critics especially will want to make their slow, careful way through much of what Eco has to say.

Although I don't agree with some of Eco's premises, I still found this book intriguing, both for its ideas and the way they are presented. Eco knows his material, and his passion for the subject matter can be infectious. Recommended for serious students of literature and semiotics, but not for the casual reader.

Umberto Eco is most famous in this country for his bestselling novel The Name of the Rose (1980) that was subsequently made into a Hollywood film starring Sean Connery. He is the author of a number other of novels including Foucault's Pendulum (1988), Baudolino (2002), and most recently The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005). First and foremost, however, Eco is a literary theorist and professor of semiotics, the philosophical theory of signs and symbols.

On Literature is a collection of essays and addresses given over the course of his career. More general essays like "On Style" and "On Symbolism" are mixed with those focused on Dante, Wilde, and The Communist Manifesto. Other essays--most notably "Borges and My Anxiety of Influence," "How I Write," and "The Power of Falsehood"-- illuminate Eco's own literary work in different ways.

A quick look at the table of contents is enough to show that despite being a collection of essays, this is a serious work of literary criticism. The book is being billed as "illuminating, accessible, [and] stimulating" (back cover text). It is illuminating and stimulating, but in all honestly it is a bit dense for general consumption. The essays on specific authors and texts are brilliant, but they will be best enjoyed by people who have actually read the texts Eco is discussing.

Because I've spent a lot of time dealing with James Joyce lately, I appreciated "A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor," an essay in which Eco shows the seeds of Joyce's later literary work in young Jim's undergraduate writings.

"The American Myth in Three Anti-American Generations" is another great find. Originally written as a paper for a conference at Columbia University, it discusses the roots of the Italian image of America beginning with the generation that came to age in the 1930s.

On Literature is not an easy read, but if you have time and interest you will find that Eco's latest collection of essays is full of passion and insight.

Armchair Interviews says: Although not recommended for the casual reader, On Literature is a must-have for students of literature.

Although I admire Eco's broad learning and his usual clarity of expression, I did not find this book as revealing as I had hoped. He does have a wonderful definition: "a work of literature is a miracle of invention." I had hoped to get a better understanding of semiotics from the book, since he is a semiotician. He never quite gives it to me, although he includes some insights. For example, in relation to the passage just quoted, he says: "semiotic inquiry is reduced to the discovery of the same constants in every text and thus loses sight of the inventions." On the next page, he adds that "semiotic discourse often fails to distinguish between 'manner' and 'style.'" He then summarizes Hegel's points that manner is "a repetitive obsession of the author" (Eco's words) while style is "the capacity [of a writer] constantly to outdo himself. And yet it is textual semiotics that is the only critique capable of bringing out such differences."

So what is semiotics? He never specifies, but he does say, "In the realm of style (as a way of giving form) belongs not only the use of language (or of colors, or of sounds, according to the semiotic systems or universes used) but also the way of deploying narrative structures, portraying characters, and articulating points of view." Later he observes that "if proper criticism is understanding and making others understand how a text is made, and if the review and the history of literature are unable to do this adequately, the only true form of criticism is a semiotic analysis of the text." Further, "a critical review cannot be exempt, except in cases of exceptional cowardice, from pronouncing a verdict on what the text says," but "textual criticism . . . is always semiotic even when it does not know it is, or even when it denies it is."

Now Webster defines semiotics as "a general philosophical theory of signs and symbols that deals esp. with their function in both artificially constructed and natural languages and comprises syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics." Thus, I thought his essay "On Symbolism" would be helpful. It is to a degree, but though less obscure than Hayden White (for example), Eco is almost equally hard to pin down, intentionally I think. For example: "Sensitivity to the symbolic mode stems from having noticed that there is something in the text that has meaning and yet could easily not have been there, and one wonders why it is there." And: "A symbol is an epiphany with Magi whose origins and destination we do not know, nor whom they have come to adore."--a wonderful metaphor, but it is less than precise about what symbolism really is. A little more helpful, perhaps: "Today it is we who demand that poetry, and often fiction, supply us not just with the expression of emotions, or an account of actions, or morality, but also with symbolic flashes, pale ersatz elements of a truth we no longer seek in religion."

More helpful about deconstruction than symbol, he speaks of "today's deconstructionist heresy, which seems to assume that a divinity or malign subconscious made us talk always and only with a second meaning, and that everything we say is inessential because the essence of our discourse lies elsewhere, in a symbolic realm we are often unaware of. . . . [T]he symbolic diamond, . . . meant to flash in the dark and dazzle us at sudden but very rare moments, has become a neon strip that pervades the texture of every discourse. This is too much of a good thing." A bit further on, he says "the second heresy is to be found in the information world [including coded phrases], which seeks a secret meaning in every event and every expression. This is the curse of the contemporary writer." Since we are incapable of finding a real symbol, "we look for it even where it does not exist as a textual mode." This is hardly reassuring to anyone who feels obliged to identify and interpret what appear to be symbols in a text, although it gives useful hints.

There is much more, and the collection of essays is well worth reading if only for its bon mots and its fruitful ambiguities, but let me conclude with a pronouncement about philosophy, narrative, and truth: "Instead of going to look for truth in the philosophers of the past, much contemporary philosophy has gone to look for it in Proust or Kafka, Joyce or Mann." (I know this to be true from my own readings.) "Thus it is not so much that philosophers have given up pursuing the truth as that art and literature have also taken on that function."

Recommended for anyone interested in understanding literature and criticism who is not expecting every essay to be as insightful as some of them are.

What Umberto Eco offers in this collection of essays is a publication of illuminating and useful views and descriptions of various aspects of literature. This is a great tool for a would be writer who enjoys Eco's work(with incites into his own novels you may want to buy a second used copy of the title for taking notes in the margin and highlighting important passages), or just an interesting read for fans of literature.
My only misgivings about this book is that it is too short and deals with only a few choice works and ideas. I was hoping On Literature would be more of a textbook but that was clearly wishful thinking.

There seems to be a hiccup in the Kindle Store's database. This book is a collection of essays on literature put together by a United States professor of literature. It is not, as implied, a translation of the lectures by Umberto Eco.