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Eco's essays read like letters from a friend, trying to share something he loves with someone he likes.... Read this brilliant, enjoyable, and possibly revolutionary book." --George J. Leonard, San Francisco Review of Books ... a wealth of insight and instruction." --J. O. Tate, National Review If anyone can make [semiotics] clear, it's Professor Eco.... Professor Eco's theme deserves respect; language should be used to communicate more easily without literary border guards." --The New York Times The limits of interpretation mark the limits of our world. Umberto Eco's new collection of essays touches deftly on such matters." --Times Literary Supplement It is a careful and challenging collection of essays that broach topics rarely considered with any seriousness by literary theorists." --Diacritics Umberto Eco focuses here on what he once called "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"--that is, the belief that many interpreters have gone too far in their domination of texts, thereby destroying meaning and the basis for communication.… (more)
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I especially appreciate the idea that, while the best interpretation of a given work cannot be identified, it is a simple(!) matter to demonstrate which are bad. But, as Eco says in the great epilogue to his great novel The Name of the Rose, this is a matter for readers to determine, text in hand—the author is deliberately excluded. Eco may this be a helpful corrective to those who, having little understood what, say, Jacques Derrida or Roland Barthes mean with the ascendancy of the reader in interpretation, incorrectly believe that, say, alternative facts are a thing that exist over against alternative interpretations of facts. I haven’t said this well.