Table of Contents

1. Umberto Eco's intellectual origins: medieval aesthetics, publishing and mass media; 2. The open work, misreadings, and modernist aesthetics; 3. Cultural theory and popular culture: from structuralism to semiotics; 4. From semiotics to narrative theory in a decade of radical social change; 5. 'To make truth laugh': postmodern theory and practice in The Name of the Rose; 6. Interpretation, overinterpretation, paranoid interpretation, and Foucault's Pendulum; 7. Inferential strolls and narrative shipwrecks: Six Walks and The Island of the Day Before; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography.

Promotional Information

The first comprehensive study in English of Umberto Eco's theories and fictions.

Reviews

"Peter Bondanella's Umberto Eco and the Open Text, an extremely intelligent, well-researched monograph and the most lucid study on Umberto Eco to date, was certainly well worth the wait. Peter Bondanella's study of Umberto Eco is a invaluable guide for anyone who wishes to understand and appreciate one of the wittiest and most erudite, intelligent, and entertaining intellectuals of our time." Rocco Capozzi, World Literature Today "Bondanella's book amounts to a masterful sketch of Italian and Western intellectual history from the early 1950's to the present." The Comparatist