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Collected here are some of Umberto Eco’s finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: “In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some ‘signs.’ These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behavior, political acts, artificial landscapes.”
From Disneyland to holography and wax museums, Eco explores America’s obsession with artificial reality, suggesting that the craft of forgery has in certain cases exceeded reality itself. He examines Western culture’s enduring fascination with the middle ages, proposing that our most pressing modern concerns began in that time. He delves into an array of topics, from sports to media to what he calls the crisis of reason.
Throughout these travels—both physical and mental—Eco displays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum.
Translated by William Weaver
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 24, 2014 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780547545967
- File size: 778 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780547545967
- File size: 1337 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 27, 1990
``This uneven collection reflects the Italian scholar's love of the Middle Ages--one essay compares American universities to monasteries, another focuses on Thomas Aquinas--though, for the most part, Eco relentlessly analyzes the present,'' reported PW. -
May 1, 1986
By "hyperreality'' Eco is alluding to the American ``frantic desire for the almost real,'' the yen for fakes to fill a cultural void. The trenchant title essay analyzes the American psyche as it hops from erotic laser holograms to the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Disneyland. Eco, well known as a novelist
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