Synopses & Reviews
In this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.
Review
"Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous....The literary examples Eco employs range from Dante to Dumas, from Sterne to Spillane. His text is thought-provoking, often outright funny, and full of surprising juxtapositions." Atlantic Monthly
Review
"Reading [these chapters] is indeed like wandering in the woods...They might in fact be called, more prosaically, How to Be a Good Reader, for Eco, in his incredibly manipulative way, has you eating out of his hand by the end of them." Los Angeles Times Book Review
Review
"The dim boundary between the imaginary and the real is Eco's home terrain....He is a foxy gamesman, using enchanted woods as a flexible image for narrative texts, and mustering a playful array of allusions from The Three Musketeers to the Rocky Horror Picture Show." Boston Globe
Review
"[This] dashing and stylish series of six lectures...displays Umberto Eco's enviable ability to transform arid semiotics and narrative theory into intellectual entertainment." Independent
Synopsis
In Six Walks in the Fictional Woods Umberto Eco shares with us his Secret Life as a reader--his love for MAD magazine, for Scarlett O'Hara, for the nineteenth-century French novelist Nerval's Sylvie, for Little Red Riding Hood, Agatha Christie, Agent 007 and all his ladies. We see, hear, and feel Umberto Eco, the passionate reader who has gotten lost over and over again in the woods, loved it, and come back to tell the tale, The Tale of Tales. Eco tells us how fiction works, and he also tells us why we love fiction so much. This is no deconstructionist ripping the veil off the Wizard of Oz to reveal his paltry tricks, but the Wizard of Art himself inviting us to join him up at his level, the Sorcerer inviting us to become his apprentice.
Synopsis
"Come stroll with me through the leafy glades of narrative..." With Umberto Eco as companion and guide, who could resist such an invitation? In this exhilarating book, we accompany him as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms. How does a text signal the type of reader it wants, and how does it "stage" for us, through its style and voice, a certain version of the author? What is the relation between this "model reader" and "model author"? How does narrative lead us on, persuade us to lose ourselves in its depths? The range of Eco's examples is astonishing - from fairy tales, through Flaubert, Poe, and Manzoni, to Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, and Casablanca. In a detailed analysis of one of his favorite texts, Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, Eco examines the uses of temporal ambiguity, demystifying the "mists" in the literary forest. In another chapter, he takes detective fiction and pornography as a basis for discussing narrative pace - strategic speeding up and slowing down - and the relationship between real time and narrative time. And in yet another chapter, we follow Eco as he shadows the musketeer D'Artagnan through the streets of seventeenth-century Paris, a trail that leads us to the uncertain boundary between story and history. Fiction is parasitically dependent on reality; but reality, too, feeds on fiction. Here, the book reveals its serious side. What are the implications for society when the line between reality and fiction becomes blurred? How are stories ("plots" in the mostinsidious sense of the word) constructed over the course of time? In order to be responsible citizens of the world, Eco shows, we must be skilled and incisive readers. Getting lost in the blurry region where the real and the fictional merge can be a disturbing experience. But Eco's unerr
About the Author
Umberto Eco teaches at the University of Bologna and is the author of many books, including Theory of Semiotics, The Role of the Reader, and The Open Work, as well as the best-selling novels The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum.
Table of Contents
1. Entering The Woods
2. The Woods Of Loisy
3. Lingering In The Woods
4. Possible Woods
5. The Strange Case Of The Rue Servandoni
6. Fictional Protocols
Notes
Index