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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Critical Work for Critical Scholars,
By jobu_pks (San Antonio, TX United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Open Work (Paperback)
Most post-modernist scholars, especially critical scholars, have probably already read The Open Work. It is considered a seminal work. Eco advances the theory that literary works necessarily leave much of the details of a story to the reader. Taking Moby Dick as an example, he notes that the book never mentions that the sailors on the Pequod have two legs. It is the work of the reader to reach such a conclusion based on the context of the novel. While Captain Ahab is mentioned as having only one leg, Melville never says which one, again leaving to the reader to fill in the details. In this sense, literature is "parasitic," according to Eco, because it requires the reader to fill in many of the details of a given story.This corresponds with other post-modernists who claim that meaning resides in the receiver of a text. However, Eco establishes his own ground in claiming that authors can limit the reader's options for interpretation. For Eco, while much meaning resides in the interpretation of a text, the symbols employed by an author also have some meaning that a reasonable interpreter should understand. The "open work" then, is not an absolute condition. Some works will be more open than others. While this may sound like a repudiation of many post-modernists (and it is), readers should rember that it was originally published quite some time ago. At the time, it was considered revolutionary. It stands today as a still-important work in the field of semiotics and critical theory. I gave it four stars not because it isn't excellent (it is) or well-written (it is, and far easier to read than, say, Foucault) but because it is no longer cutting edge.
3 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enlightened book,
By
This review is from: The Open Work (Paperback)
After i read this book i could draw so much paralleles, concise ones, between the artists that i liked that i had never realised before that this was the real appeal to me in reading this book. I could see i line crossing between James Joyce, Bretch, Kubrick and Kafka. And all the modernism movement really took place in my mind. And it's a easy-reading book, beside the parts about semiology, wich are necessary to make some points clear. The two final parts of the book, about the zen mania of the 50's and the other about Marx, don't seem to be at the center of matter but are also good reading. I think anybody interested in arts should look at this book.
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