Abstract
Like the critics or theorists just discussed, Umberto Eco makes serious enquires into language, literature and the world. Unlike these theorists, Eco also became an internationally known novelist. He is, then, a key figure because he provides a bridge between Shakespeare, who, unlike Philip Sidney, never wrote on poetics or literary theory, and figures, like Barbara Johnson, who does not seem to have published poetry or fiction. Like Harold Bloom and George Steiner after him, Northrop Frye wrote fiction and poetry, which I have discussed elsewhere, but this was not his primary concern.1 Eco becomes an interesting figure for examining language and place, text and world.
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Notes
Before Frye’s death, I talked about him as a creative writer. For a discussion written about that time, see, for instance, Jonathan Hart, “The Road Not Taken: The Fictions of Northrop Frye,” The British Journal of Canadian Studies 9 (1994): 216–37.
Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa (Milano: Bompiani, 1980); English translation: The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 19831.
This chapter is a revised version of my talk, “Between Story and History: Umberto Eco in Text and Context,” as part of the colloquium at Brock University, “The Novels of Umberto Eco as ‘Historiographic Metafiction’: Studies in Comparative Literatures and the Arts,” Tuesday, April 2, 2013, 1:00 pm-5:00 pm, Sankey Chamber. My thanks to Corrado Federici and Cristina Santos for the invitation and hospitality and to Murray Knuttila, Greg Finn, Douglas Kneale and others at Brock for welcoming me on this and on another occasion. Many thanks, too, for all those who came to the colloquium and to the other speakers: Norma Bouchard, Annarita Primier and Rocco Capozzi. For wide-ranging collections, see Umberto Eco, ed. Mike Gane and Nicholas Gane (London: Sage, 2005)
New Essays on Umberto Eco, ed. Peter Bondanella (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), which includes essays by Bouchard and Capozzi. On Eco, pragmatism and interpretation,
see Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999).
See Umberto Eco, with Richard Rorty, Jonathan Culler, Christine Brooke-Rose, th Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 23.
See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976)
Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979)
Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Eco, Interpretation, 73–86. See Umberto Eco, Postille al nome della rosa, 1983; English translation: Postscript to The Name of the Rose, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984).
See also Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (London: Secker & Warburg, 1989).
Umberto Eco, Five Moral Pieces, trans. Alastair McEwen (1997; repr., New York: Harcourt, 2001), 17.
Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 1.
Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings, trans. Richard Dixon (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), 217.
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© 2013 Jonathan Hart
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Hart, J. (2013). Eco, Story and History. In: From Shakespeare to Obama. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137375827_8
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