DOCSLIB.ORG

Carnivalisation of Cultures: a Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’S Novels

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Carnivalisation of Cultures: a Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’S Novels CARNIVALISATION OF CULTURES: A BAKHTINIAN READING OF UMBERTO ECO’S NOVELS Dissertation submitted to Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Reenu George Department of English SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVERSITY OF SANSKRIT KALADY – 683 574 JANUARY 2017 CARNIVALISATION OF CULTURES: A BAKHTINIAN READING OF UMBERTO ECO’S NOVELS Dissertation submitted to Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, Kerala in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English Reenu George Department of English SREE SANKARACHARYA UNIVERSITY OF SANSKRIT KALADY – 683 574 JANUARY 2017 Dr. N Jenny Rappai Associate Professor Department of English Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit Kalady, Kerala Certificate This is to certify that the thesis entitled Carnivalisation of Cultures: A Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’s Novels, is an authentic record of research work carried out by Smt. Reenu George in the Department of English, Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, under my guidance and supervision and that no part of the thesis has been presented before for the award of any other degree, diploma, fellowship, title or recognition before. Kalady 03 January 2017 Dr. N Jenny Rappai Research Supervisor Declaration I, hereby declare that the thesis entitled Carnivalisation of Cultures: A Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’s Novels, submitted by me to Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit, Kalady, for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, is a bonafide record of the original work done by me under the supervision and guidance of Dr. N. Jenny Rappai, Associate Professor of English, and that the thesis has not formed the basis for the award of any degree or diploma. Kalady 03 January 2017 Reenu George Acknowledgement The thesis would not have prevailed, but for my firm faith in God. I am indebted to the Almighty for making this possible. I am obliged to my father (late) for his motivation and support during the writing of my thesis. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to my supervising teacher, Dr. N. Jenny Rappai for her guidance, help, encouragement and understanding in the writing of my thesis. I acknowledge with gratitude the help and encouragement given to me by the faculty members of the Department of English, University of Calicut. I also record my gratitude to the members on the staff of the English Department Library, CHMK Library, University of Calicut and Sree Sankaracharya University of Sanskrit Library, Kalady for the help given to me. I am indebted to the teaching and non-teaching staff of the Department of English and SSUS Kalady for providing all necessary facilities for my work. I record a special word of thanks to my husband Bijoy and my daughters: Merlin, Sherlin & Jeslin for being an immense source of help and sustenance throughout the period of my research. Lastly, I express my gratitude to all the people who, in various ways have helped me in completing the thesis. Reenu George Preface The corpus of Umberto Eco’s novels ranges from The Name of the Rose to Numero Zero. His novels are historiographic in nature as they engage with history and fiction simultaneously. Eco, through his novels, opens up a dialogue between history and fiction. The novels are metafictions as they discuss the textual strategies like ‘the Author’, ‘the text’ and ‘the reader’. The novels, in the process of actualization become ‘virtual texts’ that include not only the writer’s repertoire of knowledge but also the readers’ world knowledge. It becomes an ‘Encyclopedia’ of Knowledge. Eco’s novels are collages of signs and quotations and form linguistic pastiches. “Canivalization of Cultures: A Bakhtinian Reading of Umberto Eco’s Novels” has its relevance in the context of Cultural Studies where a text is interpreted in terms of culture. The study aims to analyze the novels of Umberto Eco from a Bakhtinian perspective employing the concepts: “Heteroglossia”, “Polyphony”, “Dialogism” and “Carnival”. In the context, the role of the Reader and the concept of the Text are also analyzed. Contents Introduction 1 - 16 Chapter 1 Dialogism, Reader and the Text 17 - 59 Chapter 2 Dialogism in Eco’s Novels 60 - 105 Chapter 3 Reader and the Text 106 - 144 Chapter 4 Intertextual Rhizomes 145 - 186 Conclusion 187 - 200 Works Consulted 201 - 217 The postmodern reply to the modern consists in recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed…must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of a postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, “I love you madly,” because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say,“As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly−.” (Eco, The Name of the Rose, pp. 530 – 1) 1 Introduction "This text is a textile of other texts, a 'whodunit' of quotations, a book built upon books" (Stephens, 51). This forms the description of Eco’s first novel The Name of the Rose. This is a mode of writing that has brought him under the category of Post modern writers who perceive text as a fabric of quotations. As Todorov states, "there is no utterance devoid of intertextual dimension," ( 60- 62) there is no literary text without relation to other texts which have preceded it of will follow it. Eco, in fact, has created ‘postmodernisms’ through his literary corpus and interrogates the concepts of text, history, reality, author function, role of the reader and interpretation. He becomes a successor to Italo Calvino, in his engagement with postmodernism. Eco’s novels are often a ‘montage’ of different cultural artifacts belonging to both high and low culture. He fuses the ‘academic’ with the ‘popular’ thereby subverting the canon of literature. Umberto Eco (1932-2006) was born in the city of Alessandria in Northern Italy. His first novel The Name of the Rose (1980) is a blending of history, semiotics, medieval studies and literary theory. In it, he discusses the existential experiences of man in a pluralistic society. The 2 novel presents an Italian monastery with a labyrinthine library where scholars from different parts of the world seek refuge. There are antiquarians, librarians, lubricators and scribes to pursue their studies of interest. The narrator Adso, a Benedictine novice, in company with the protagonist William, a Franciscan monk arrives at the abbey to investigate the murder of a young monk Adelmo. During the course of investigation, several other monks die under mysterious circumstances. Since William and Adso belong to two different congregations, they differ in their approach to life. The Benedictine who has been brought up in strict discipline restricts himself from enjoying the beauty of nature while the Franciscan monk basks in the beauty of the cosmos, enjoying the landscape he sees around. There are also monks of other orders, for instance, Ubertino of Casale of the Cluniac order who advocates poverty and criticizes the authority of the Pope. His conversation with William reveals how his ideology is different from that of the free thinking William’s. Ubertino is a simple man strictly adhering to the vow of poverty. In the novel, the spiritual always remain in dialectic with the secular. Salvatore and Remigeo masquerading spirituality are very much secular within. Salvatore, with his disproportionate appearance, is always the confined in life and his preparation to perform the rustic ritual is his 3 strategy to fight the forces that push him to the periphery. Jorge, the blind elderly monk, who ardently guards the library, symbolizes the ancient Christian spirit that equates humans to the fallen beings. Throughout the novel there is the dialogism between the old generation Christian belief and the new one. And it reaches its zenith in the final chapters which portray an open confrontation between these two philosophies. Jorge believes that Aristotle has undone the teachings Christianity accumulated over centuries. His second book on comedy elevates laughter to the status of art nullifying fear. Jorge dreads that this book, once it sees light, will deconstruct the very foundation of Christianity which is the fear of God. (Proverbs 9:10) The second novel, Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) is a critique on the excess conspiracy theories found in postmodern literature. The very title ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ is a scientific term which pervades throughout the narrative. Pendulum is both a signifier and signified in the novel. At the very outset of the novel, the narrator Casaubon is hiding in the Conservatoire in Paris and the sequence of events are unfolded in his flashback. The narrator’s voice is the author’s voice in its refracted form. But simultaneously it contradicts that of the author. Very often the readers are made to doubt on the reliability of Casaubon’s narration. 4 Casaubon, Diotellevi and Belbo are associated with the Garamond Press. They were entrusted with the duty of editing scores of manuscripts submitted by diabolic writers. Colonel Ardenti approaches them with a manuscript. He shows them a message which he claims to have got from a man named Ingolf. He interprets it as a Templar message about the secret of telluric currents guarded by them. He leaves the manuscript with the editors. Later, he is found missing. The trio becomes interested in the message and start working on it. The evolved ‘The Plan’ by feeding words, selected at random from the manuscripts, into their personal computer. They become so obsessed with ‘The Plan’ and started to believe in its existence. The invisible authorial voice that reveals the cabalistic background of Diotellevi, the research interest of Casaubon and the mystical experience of Belbo’s childhood and his creativity failure, indirectly proclaim narrator’s voice as unreliable.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Eco and Popular Culture Norma Bouchard
    Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-85209-8 - New Essays on Umberto Eco Edited by Peter Bondanella Excerpt More information chapter 1 Eco and popular culture Norma Bouchard Since the beginning of his long and most distinguished career, Umberto Eco has demonstrated an equal devotion to the high canon of Western literature and to popular, mass-produced and mass-consumed, artifacts. Within Eco’s large corpus of published works, however, it is possible to chart different as well as evolving evaluations of the aesthetic merit of both popular and high cultural artifacts. Because such evaluations belong to a corpus that spans from the 1950s to the present, they necessarily reflect the larger epistemological changes that ensued when the resistance to commercialized mass culture on the part of an elitist, aristocratic strand of modern art theory gave way to a postmodernist blurring of the divide between different types of discourses. Yet, it is also crucial to remem- ber that, from his earlier publications onwards, Eco has approached the cultural field as a vast domain of symbolic production where high- and lowbrow arts not only coexist, but also are both complementary and sometimes interchangeable. This holistic understanding of the cultural field explains Eco’s earlier praise of selected popular works amidst a pleth- ora of negative evaluations, as well as his later fictional practice of cita- tions and replays that shapes his work as best-selling novelist of The Name of the Rose (1980), followed by Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1994), Baudolino (2000), and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2004).
    [Show full text]
  • AS CRIATURAS EM BAUDOLINO DE UMBERTO ECO: Criação De Um Bestiário Tridimensional
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Universidade de Lisboa: Repositório.UL UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA FACULDADE DE BELAS-ARTES AS CRIATURAS EM BAUDOLINO DE UMBERTO ECO: criação de um bestiário tridimensional João Pedro Reis Rico dos Santos Trabalho de Projeto Mestrado em Desenho Trabalho de Projeto orientado pelo Prof. Doutor Henrique Antunes Prata Dias da Costa 2018 DECLARAÇÃO DE AUTORIA Eu João Pedro Reis Rico dos Santos, declaro que o trabalho de projeto de mestrado intitulada “As criaturas em Baudolino de Umberto Eco: criação de um bestiário tridimensional”, é o resultado da minha investigação pessoal e independente. O conteúdo é original e todas as fontes consultadas estão devidamente mencionadas na bibliografia ou outras listagens de fontes documentais, tal como todas as citações diretas ou indiretas têm devida indicação ao longo do trabalho segundo as normas académicas. O Candidato Lisboa, 31 Outubro 2018 2 RESUMO Propõe-se através deste trabalho a criação de um bestiário tridimensional a partir de “Baudolino” de Umberto Eco, onde se representarão em formato tridimensional através da modelação tridimensional cada uma das criaturas complementando a descrição de Eco com outras obtidas em diferentes bestiários recolhidos. Faz-se em primeiro lugar uma revisão do estado da arte, depois um breve estudo sobre o contexto histórico com particular enfase na queda de Constantinopla integrando- a na geografia fantástica das criaturas da terra de Prestes João. Desenvolve-se a investigação através da coleção de autores relacionados com o tema dos bestiários medievais, com destaque na criação digital de monstros e os seus autores, os casos de Plínio o Velho e das crónicas de Nuremberga.
    [Show full text]
  • Umberto Eco Book Review.Fm
    Mundus Senescit: Umberto Eco recreates the Middle Ages Umberto Eco’s recent historical novel Baudolino opens with a sort of gibberish combination of Latin, German, Italian, and English, a gleeful combination of inside jokes, puns, and scholarly winks and nods. The tale, written on top of an earlier history that has been scratched off the parchment but occasionally peaks through, is a story in a story in a story on a story. If that sounds complicated—well, it is. Trickster Baudolino, an unreliable narrator by his own unreliable report, tells his long life story to Niketas, an historian whom Baudolino hopes will be able to give shape and meaning to an otherwise almost random series of events and decisions. From the very beginning, Eco is playing with myth, truth, history, and storytelling—and tackling a project far more lofty than Niketas’. With the recent publication of Baudolino, Umberto Eco returns to writing fiction set in the Middle Ages—and creates an ultimate symbol for medieval thought and history, in its own time and in our own. Eco’s concern for medieval philosophy, present in both his popular and scholarly works, is in fact a sort of nostalgia for a time now much maligned and misunderstood, a forgotten kingdom of intellect and imagination. Very much a realist, Eco never suggests we can— or should—return to a medieval mindset (Society for Creative Anachronism aside, no one who truly knows the Middle Ages could ever wish to live it over.) But in medieval thought he finds an elegant system, though one that was obsessed with its own eventual irrelevance and decay.
    [Show full text]
  • Rocco Capozzi 211 the RETURN of UMBERTO ECO. BAUDOLINO
    Rocco Capozzi 211 THE RETURN OF UMBERTO ECO. BAUDOLINO HOMO LUDENS: DESCRIBING THE UNKNOWN1 nlike the fanfare2 that surrounded Umberto Eco's second novel, his most challenging and engaging essay-novel Il pendolo di UFoucault (1988; Foucault's Pendulum), or the air of suspense that preceded the publication of his third metafictional novel, L'isola del giorno dopo (1994; The Island of the Day Before), Baudolino came out - relatively speaking - with very little clamour. The question that readers may be asking is whether this novel will also go out with a "whimper", or whether it will go out with a "bang", selling millions of copies around the world, like The Name of the Rose. After three months Baudolino remains on top of the bestseller list in Italy, but it is much too early to speak of its true or lasting success with critics or the general public. Baudolino is unquestionably another example of Eco's well known postmodern encyclopedic pastiche and has plenty of ingredients - humor, intertextuality, filmic effects, funny anecdotes, legends, and a clever fusion of history and elements taken from "pop culture" - for it to become another success story. But, regardless of the number of 1 This is the first of a two-part article on the coherence of Eco's fiction. In the second part I shall deal with specific leitmotifs that link Baudolino to The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum. I shall also focus on other features such as levels of laughter, historicity, and how Eco once again deals with a variety of notions of knowledge.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael Brooks Dissertation Graduate School Submission Revised 12-10
    A Dissertation Entitled Prester John: A Reexamination and Compendium of the Mythical Figure Who Helped Spark European Expansion By Michael E. Brooks Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Doctor of Philosophy degree in History _______________________________ Advisor: Dr. Glenn J. Ames _______________________________ Dr. Larry Wilcox _______________________________ Dr. Michael Jakobson _______________________________ Dr. Andrew Schocket _______________________________ College of Graduate Studies The University of Toledo December 2009 Copyright 2009, Michael E. Brooks This document is copyrighted material. Under copyright law, no part of this document may be reproduced without the expressed permission of the author. An Abstract of Prester John: A Reexamination and Compendium of the Mythical Figure Who Helped Spark European Expansion by Michael E. Brooks Submitted as partial fulfillment of the requirements for The Doctor of Philosophy degree in History The University of Toledo December 2009 This work reinterprets the evolution and pervasiveness of the Prester John myth, following the legend from its geographical and historical roots in central and eastern Asia to its final setting in Abyssinia. However, unlike most works on the subject, which typically begin with the twelfth-century writings of Otto of Freising, the author of this dissertation argues that a more complete understanding of the legendary priest-king requires an analysis of the literary traditions that created the ideal environment for the naissance of the Prester John saga. In addition, the influence that the Prester John legend exerted on the mindset of late medieval and early modern Europeans has been understated by many historians; this is in part due to the effects of periodization, whereby modern writers expect historical figures such as the Infante Dom Henrique, Christopher Columbus, and Duarte Lopes to behave in a modern - rather than late medieval - fashion.
    [Show full text]
  • Inscription on the Body : Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature
    Title: Inscription on the Body: monstrous Children in Middle English Literature Author: Anna Czarnowus Citation style: Czarnowus Anna. (2009). Inscription on the Body: monstrous Children in Middle English Literature. Katowice: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego. INSCRIPTION ON THE BODY Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature NR 2741 Anna Czarnowus INSCRIPTION ON THE BODY Monstrous Children in Middle English Literature Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego Katowice 2009 Editor of the Series: Historia Literatur Obcych Magdalena Wandzioch Reviewer Andrzej Dąbrówka Contents Acknowledgments 7 Introduction 9 Chapter One Monstrous Images, Monstrous Selves: Medieval and Renaissance Ideas . 19 Chapter Two The Fictions of Monstrosity in The Man of Law’s Tale and Emaré 43 Chapter Three “Stille as ston”: Oriental Deformity in The King of Tars 71 Chapter Four From a Demonic to a Canine Self: Moral Depravity and Holiness in Sir Gowther 98 Conclusion 125 Bibliography 129 Index of Personal Names 141 Streszczenie 145 Résumé 147 Acknowledgments This book is a shortened and modified version of the doctoral dissertation I wrote at the University of Silesia with Professor Piotr Wilczek as the advisor, to whom I remain grateful for all his help and encouragement. I am equally thankful to the distinguished reviewers of the dissertation, Professor Andrzej Wicher of the University of Łódź, who has assisted my scholarly activities for many years informally, but with great dedication, and Professor Tadeusz Rachwał of the English Department at the School of Applied Psychology in Warsaw, who also taught me a lot. I would also like to express my gratitude to the reviewer of this book, Professor Andrzej Dąbrówka of the Institute of Literary Studies at the Polish Academy of Sci- ences, Warsaw (Instytut Badań Literackich Polskiej Akademii Nauk) for all his helpful commentaries.
    [Show full text]
  • Secrets, Lies and Conspiracies in Umberto Eco's Writings
    Semiotica 2019; aop Raúl Rodríguez-Ferrándiz* Faith in fakes: Secrets, lies and conspiracies in Umberto Eco’s writings https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2017-0137 Abstract: This paper offers a re-reading of the works of Umberto Eco, be they academic, journalistic or literary, with a pseudologic tone: his desire to investigate the mechanisms of lying, and their relation with fiction, falsification, error, secrecy, and conspiracy. The study will review some of his main academic texts in the fields of semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, and will make some references to his recent novels and essay compilations, as well as offer an explanation of how the evolution of his thoughts takes a pessimistic turn. The face of the lie, which initially was aesthetic consolation and consumerist delusion, and then a game of intelligence, a creative stimulus and an interpretive challenge, changes when serves the purpose of extortion, manipulation, and war. In short, it could be argued that Eco became increasingly disappointed by deceptions, and lost faith in fakes and forgeries. Keywords: Umberto Eco, lie, secrecy, aesthetics, rhetoric, semiotics As a scholar of semiotics, I have always maintained that what characterizes signs and languages is not so much that they serve to name what is before our eyes, but that they serve to refer to what is not there. In this way, they also serve to lie. The problem with lying and falsehood has always been, from the theoretical point of view, very important for me. It is linked to the problem that concerns all philosophers: truth. It is very difficult to establish what it is true.
    [Show full text]
  • Indologica Taurinensia
    INDOLOGICA TAURINENSIA THE JOURNAL OF THE INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SANSKRIT STUDIES VOLUME XXXIX 2013 EDIZIONI AIT Publisher: Comitato AIT, corso Trento 13 – 10129 Torino (Italy) Email: [email protected]; [email protected] Printer: Edizioni ETS, Pisa (Italy) Annual Subscription (1 issue): € 30,00 Electronic version: www.indologica.com Sole Agents: Comitato AIT Copyright © 2013 Comitato AIT per la promozione degli Studi sull’India e sul Sud-Est Asiatico Irma Piovano (President) - Saverio Sani (Vice President) - Victor Agostini (Secretary). corso Trento 13 - 10129 Torino (Italy) C.F. 97651370013 – R.E.A. Torino, n. 1048465 – R..O .C., n. 14802 Autorizzazione del Tribunale di Torino N. 4703 del 21/7/1994 I.S.N.N. 1023-3881 CONTENTS ARTICLES GIACOMO BENEDETTI The figure of the R̥ṣi in the Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa.......... p. 9 KAPIL KUMAR BHATTACHARYYA Science communication in the Indian perspective: insights from the Indian experience .................................. p. 67 HORST BRINKHAUS Sūryavaṃśa - Somavaṃśa - Harivaṃśa ............................ p. 83 KLAUS KARTTUNEN India as a mirror of otherness in the classical and medieval West (The establishment and development of an idea of India, of a myth called India) ........................... p. 95 TAKAHIRO KATO Bhāskara’s concept of jñānakarmasamuccaya ................. p. 137 FRANK KÖHLER RV 3.26: poetry and the multifarious nature of Agni........ p. 155 NATALIA R. LIDOVA Rasa in the Nāṭyaśāstra – Aesthetic and Ritual ................ p. 187 GIANNI PELLEGRINI Dream and Khyativāda: a Survey on analogies and differences.......................................................................... p. 213 ALEXANDRA R. ZINOVYEVA Heteroglossia and Code-switching in Śūdraka's Mṛcchakaṭika”: Why does the theatre director speak different languages?.......................................................... p. 237 List of contributors......................................................... p. 257 REVIEWS HARI DUTT SHARMA, Glimpses of Sanskrit Poetics and Poetry.
    [Show full text]
  • Lectura Crítica De "Baudolino"
    UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA TESIS DOCTORAL Modelos medievales y reescrituras posmodernas: Lectura crítica de "Baudolino" MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR Guillermo Antonio Coll Ferrari Directora Eugenia Popeanga Chelaru Madrid 2019 © Guillermo Antonio Coll Ferrari, 2018 UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA DOCTORADO EN ESTUDIOS LITERARIOS TESIS DOCTORAL Modelos Medievales y reescrituras posmodernas: Lectura crítica de “Baudolino” MEMORIA PARA OPTAR AL GRADO DE DOCTOR PRESENTADA POR: Guillermo Antonio Coll Ferrari DIRECTORA: Eugenia Popeanga Chelaru Madrid, 2018 2 3 "¡Extraño capricho del pueblo! Exige su historia de la mano del poeta, no de la del historiador. No quiere un fiel relato de los hechos secos, sino los hechos que, disueltos en poesía original, son causa de aquéllos". Heinrich Heine 4 5 ÍNDICE 6 INTRODUCCIÓN Objetivos y metodología REESCRIBIENDO LA EDAD MEDIA La Edad Media en la era cibernética ¿Por qué Umberto Eco? ¿Por qué Baudolino? La Edad Media según Umberto Eco La portada española de “Baudolino”: un resúmen gráfico La novela histórica. Un género eterno Don Quijote de la Mancha, piedra angular La novela histórica desde Scott a Tolstoi La nueva novela histórica La novela histórica según la teoría del género EL ESTADO DE LA CUESTIÓN “El nombre de la rosa”, pautas para una nueva novela histórica 7 Analogías estructurales entre “El nombre de la rosa” y otros libros Los principios de “El nombre de la rosa” Las tres pistas de la nueva novela histórica propuesta por Eco PISTA TEMÁTICA I. BAUDOLINO, LIBRO DE VIAJES El Viaje desde la realidad histórica hacia un espacio mítico Baudolino en su pueblo natal La Corte de Federico I Baudolino en París De nuevo junto a Federico El viaje hacia el Reino del Preste Juan Pndapetzim Prisioneros del Viejo de la Montaña Constantinopla II.
    [Show full text]
  • Umberto Eco's Il Cimitero Di Praga
    Fiction Imitating History, or History Imitating Fiction? Umberto Eco’s Il Cimitero di Praga John Cameron Despite his acclaimed work in the field of semiotics, Umberto Eco is probably best known as a writer of historical fiction. His first novel The Name of the Rose (1980) not only catapulted Eco into the international spotlight, but also revitalized the genre. This revitalization inspired writers of historical fiction to use the genre to explore ‗the systems of knowing‘ (Groot 2009, 126) that we rely on to understand both the past and the present. Linda Hutcheon famously coined the term ‗historiographic metafiction‘ to describe the way that these postmodern writers of historical fiction force readers to question not only the reliability of their fictional constructions of history, but of all such constructions. This may help to explain Eco‘s persistent fascination not only with forgeries and hoaxes but with the very important roles that they have played in shaping history. In Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) the three editors Belbo, Diotallevi and Casaubon create ‗The Plan‘ in a spirit of diversion, only to find out to their amazement and horror that this fiction has been accepted by some as reality. As a writer of historical fiction, Eco is well aware of this problem, for writers in this genre are often expected to make their fiction as historically accurate as possible. Eco‘s works are clearly well researched, but Eco nevertheless insists that a writer of fiction‘s duty is to fiction first, and history second. Perhaps he would agree with Vladimir Nabokov, who insisted that ‗fiction is fiction.
    [Show full text]
  • Umberto Eco Between Postmodernism and Narrative
    Article Forum Italicum 2015, Vol. 49(3) 800–811 ! The Author(s) 2015 Umberto Eco between Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav postmodernism and DOI: 10.1177/0014585815595350 narrative: Il nome della foi.sagepub.com rosa, Il pendolo di Foucault, and La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana Erik Schilling Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, Germany; Jesus College, University of Oxford, UK Abstract In this article, Umberto Eco’s novels will be analyzed as postmodern and neo-realist narration. From Il nome della rosa onwards, Eco does not only deal with questions of (literary) theory – such as semiotics, interpretation, and deconstruction – but also with ontological issues. Although striking examples of ‘theory-aware’ texts, Il nome della rosa and Il pendolo di Foucault consider the idea of a non-arbitrary perspective on the world. Putting further emphasis on this, La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana stands in contrast to a postmodern play with theory and history. It can be described as a historical novel that highlights chances and limits of historiography. At the same time, it illustrates a return of narrative that goes hand in hand with a re-installation of author and narrator, the literary instances that had been put into question by Eco’s earlier novels. Keywords contemporary literature, historical novel, literary theory After Umberto Eco had entered the literary scene with Il nome della rosa, there was hardly a review of the novel that did not use the term ‘postmodern’ to describe Eco’s way of narration.1 The various aspects that have been called postmodern will not be revised in detail.
    [Show full text]
  • Les Prolongements Romanesques De La Matière Épique
    Les prolongements romanesques de la matière épique Jane E. Everson Royal Holloway University of London The theme of the prolongation of the epic and of the precise nature, definition and form of the vernacular epic in its prolongation over time is one to which the Société Rencesvals has returned repeatedly in its conference debates. In this plenary lecture, I concentrate on the prolongation of the vernacular epic in Italy. After addressing more general issues, such as the extent of creative originality as opposed to mere retelling in the so-called late epics, the varying chronological limits that can be set for the period of prolongation of the genre, and indeed what is meant by, what is included within, the Carolingian epic genre, I proceed to examine in detail how the Carolingian epic developed and changed in Italy from the late thirteenth century to the sixteenth century. The discussion focuses on changes in the characterisation and exploits of Roland and the mysterious case of the disappearance of William of Orange. Let me, a little surprisingly perhaps, given the title of this lecture, begin with a work produced here in the United States at the beginning of this millenium. In 2000 I received, as a gift from an American author, Ron Miller, who had sought my advice, a work entitled Bradamant. The Iron Tempest (Miller). This is in English, in prose, and described and marketed, by author and by publisher, as a novel, though its illustrations owe much to the Italian fotoromanzi tradition. But the content is entirely, and closely, derived from the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto; indeed it is in effect nothing other than a retelling of large sections of the Furioso from the perspective of the female warrior, Bradamante, rather than from that of one of the male knights of Charlemagne.
    [Show full text]