The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts

In this collection of nine essays, Umberto Eco sets forth a dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts, between a work of art that actively involves the 'addressee' in its production and one that holds the 'addressee' at bay and seeks to evoke a limited and predetermined response. He investigates the contributions of contemporary semantics to the study of narrative, and connects the modalities of textual interpretation with the problem of possible worlds.

"... not merely interesting and novel, but also exceedingly provocative and heuristically fertile." --The Review of Metaphysics

"... essential reading for anyone interesting in... the new reader-centered forms of criticism." --Library Journal

In this erudite and imaginative book, Umberto Eco sets forth a dialectic between 'open' and 'closed' texts.

Preface

Introduction: The Role of the Reader

I. Open

1. The Poetics of the Open Work

2. The Semantics of Metaphor

3. On the Possibility of Generating Aesthetic Messages in an Edenic Language

II. Closed

4. The Myth of Superman

5. Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue's Les Mysteres de Paris

6. Narrative Structures in Fleming

III. Open/Closed

7. Peirce and the Semiotic Foundations of Openness: Signs as Texts and Texts as Signs

8. Lector in Fabula: Pragmatic Strategy in a Metanarrative Text

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Bibliography