Umberto Eco summary

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Umberto Eco, (born Jan. 5, 1932, Alessandria, Italy—died Feb. 19, 2016, Milan), Italian critic and novelist. He taught in Florence, Milan, and Bologna. In The Open Work (1962), he argued for the fundamentally ambiguous nature of certain types of literature and music. He explored areas of communication, history, and semiotics in A Theory of Semiotics (1976), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), The Limits of Interpretation (1991), Kant and the Platypus (1997), and The Infinity of Lists (2009), among many other, often wide-ranging works. His novels include the erudite best-selling murder mystery The Name of the Rose (1980; film 1986), Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), The Island of the Day Before (1995), and The Prague Cemetery (2010).

literary criticism Summary

Literary criticism, the reasoned consideration of literary works and issues. It applies, as a term, to any argumentation about literature, whether or not specific works are analyzed. Plato’s cautions against the risky consequences of poetic inspiration in general in his Republic are thus often

novel Summary

Novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Within its broad framework, the genre of the novel has encompassed an