Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

by Umberto Eco

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674503953
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	07/21/1998
Series:	The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	160
File size:	796 KB

About the Author

Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was an internationally acclaimed writer, philosopher, medievalist, and professor, and the author of the best-selling novels Foucault’s Pendulum, The Name of the Rose, and The Prague Cemetery, as well as children’s books. His numerous nonfiction books include Confessions of a Young Novelist, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, and The Open Work (all from Harvard). He was a recipient of the Premio Strega, Italy’s highest literary prize; the Prince of Asturias Award for Communication and Humanities; and a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur from the government of France.

Hometown:

Bologna, Italy

Date of Birth:

January 5, 1932

Date of Death:

February 19, 2016

Place of Birth:

Alessandria, Italy

Education:

Ph.D., University of Turin, 1954

Table of Contents

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

Editorial Reviews

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-Binghamton

Library Journal

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

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 - Robert Taylor

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 - Susan Salter Reynolds

[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 - John O'Reilly

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"

[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"

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"

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"

From the Publisher

[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

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

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