From Library Journal
Eco's six lectures in Harvard's prestigious "Charles Eliot Norton Lectures" invite readers to reexamine how they read and how much is expected of them. Eco argues that any actual reader is an empirical reader with a specific personal reading context. As such, each individual reader is only part of the model reader, the author's composite imagined listener. But the individual author, always distinct from the narrator, even a first-person narrator, is also only part of the model author whose stylistic strategies help all empirical readers infer what the characteristics of the model reader are and, circling back, what those of the model author are. Using entertaining anecdotes from serious and popular fiction (Dante, Poe, Nerval, Calvino), cinema, and journalism, Eco ( Misreadings , LJ 5/1/92) scales back the systematizing of his Seventies semiotics and makes reading a commonsense activity, both challenging and titillating. For comprehensive collections in literature.
- Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-BinghamtonCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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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. (
The Atlantic )
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.
--Susan Salter Reynolds (
Los Angeles Times Book 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.
--Robert Taylor (
Boston Globe )
[This] dashing and stylish series of six lectures...displays Umberto Eco's enviable ability to transform arid semiotics and narrative theory into intellectual entertainment.
--John O'Reilly (
Independent )
