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“... damnable for being the mark of our cosmic alienation. In this sense, Genette’s book, like Eco’s, too, in part, is the history of a doomed but often laudably ingenious movement to go against the linguistic grain and rediscover a truly natural language: a language of Nature or of God as it were, the appropriateness of whose signs there could be no ...”

“... loos and luggage of people like T.S. Eliot, Ronald Knox, Eric Newby, Vladimir Nabokov and Umberto Eco. He even made it into Edmund Wilson’s bedroom. Although Holmes is a private detective, he’s frequently consulted by Scotland Yard and repeatedly succeeds where it fails. This leads Haia Shpayer-Makov to read in the Holmes saga a powerful ...”

“... in the Greek inheritance and of a lofty refusal of any kind of commitment to modernity. Since Umberto Eco is Italy’s leading cultural theorist cum-novelist, it is not for nothing that Calasso has been dubbed the ‘anti-Eco’. He begins with an epigraph from Sallust – ‘These things never happened, but are ...”

“... on the Bounty with William Bligh and was taken by the mutineers to Pitcairn Island. Hence Umberto Eco playfully suggests at the end of his own recent longitude novel, The Island of the Day Before, that the documents on which his story is based must have been found by Bligh while adrift in the South Seas, who then delivered them ‘to the ...”

“... that has baffled historians, cryptographers and bibliophiles for nearly six centuries. When Umberto Eco visited Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which has housed the manuscript since the 1960s, it was the only text he asked to see. The manuscript’s main sections are known to scholars as the ...”

“... Tomorrowland, Fantasyland and Frontierland.’ Not until European intellectuals such as Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard began to tour the US in the Reaganite 1980s did Disneyland – by then upgraded to Disney World – again seem avant-garde or, at least, exotic. These live-in fantasies were the acme of American hyper-realism – the ...”

“... the Battle of Waterloo) in the service of the kind of scholarly paranoid mystery we associate with Umberto Eco – who indeed makes a discreet appearance as a member of the Club Dumas (‘Look who’s arrived. You know him, don’t you? Professor of semiotics in Bologna’). A question about genre (could these strange events, in this kind of fiction, not ...”

“... fiction of high formal intelligence and calculated entertainment, complaining of recent novels by Umberto Eco and Julian Barnes that they are too cerebral and dispassionate for his liking. Tackling a major contemporary writer who seems to have settled for quietism – V.S. Naipaul – Rushdie attributes his ‘utter weariness’ to a withering of the ...”

“... Forgery is creative rather than contemptible, rather in the way that a sign, according to Umberto Eco, is anything you can use to lie with. Since there can be no talk of authenticity without the concept of a fake, the phoney is the true ground of great art. The forger both buttresses the authority of the canon and is cast out by it, thus becoming ...”

“... the phrase ‘that sordid artist Lucian Freud’, or in sharing the news that ‘nothing else’ Umberto Eco wrote was ‘as successful as The Name of the Rose’? The whole novel is full of statements that seem like a pastiche of the very idea of saying something, and at one point the narrator comments on the cliché ‘if you care to know my ...”

“... Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Fredric Jameson, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Umberto Eco – who were sometimes to be found lecturing in Sicily or Slovenia when they should have been teaching a class in New Jersey. At once prestigious and contentious, prized and reviled, theory was a way of amassing cultural capital for oneself as ...”

“... of the deeper shifts the globalisation process is bringing about. They are attempts at what Umberto Eco ridicules as ‘turning back the clock’, in his recent book of the same title. In Age of Extremes, Eric Hobsbawm pointed out that after the Cold War’s end capitalism was for the first time ‘on its own’: deprived of older forms to ...”

“... word ‘serendipity’ and Voltaire to produce his tale of Zadig. Ginzburg’s Bologna colleague Umberto Eco uses the story at the start of his Name of the Rose, where the monkish detective William of Baskerville, a follower of Roger Bacon and a medieval version of Sherlock Holmes, gives a complete description of a lost horse by reading its prints in ...”

“... and other forms of mixing primarily as a portent of things to come, is now far more mainstream. As Eco observes, ‘the great revolution of our century is not technical but social ... The simple fact that racism and intolerance are frowned upon today are proof of it. It involved a total reversal of human relations and relationships.’ The point is not that ...”

“... and oracular proportions. A quarter of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be seen; the New York Times routinely portrays it not as Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, but as his Ship of Fools (Schwarzenegger’s election as governor has deeply gratified ...”