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“... 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 ...”

“... family acquaintance, Paul Ricoeur, Bois reads his first book on aesthetics, The Open Work by Umberto Eco, and buys his first book of art history, Form and Meaning: Writings on the Renaissance and Modern Art by Robert Klein, which includes an intriguing essay on ‘the eclipse of the work of art’. Soon Bois is obsessed with the transformations in ...”

“... get to grips with the politics of everyday experience without giving in to either temptation. Umberto Eco has a marvellous piece, ‘Strategies Of Lying’, which analyses Nixon’s shrewd manipulation of narrative codes in the televised ‘confession’ that followed the Watergate scandal. What the President tried to bring off was a crafty ...”

“... the tremendous indictment of America over the Iraq war issued in May 2003 by Habermas, Derrida, Umberto Eco, Adolf Muschg and several illustrious others? ‘It was not reported as news, nor was it quoted by sympathisers,’ Judt remarks. ‘No one implored its authors to take up their pens and lead the way forward.’ He aptly compares the post-1989 ...”

“... Hedges has a more sophisticated way of dealing with religious Nazis; he reprints a brief essay by Umberto Eco on ‘Eternal Fascism’ and, like other critics of the religious right, seizes on Sinclair Lewis’s line from the years of the Great Depression: ‘When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.’ According ...”

“... practise translucinación, as a Chilean poetry movement expressed it. Polizzotti reminds us that Umberto Eco once remarked that the best road into Finnegans Wake is Joyce’s own translation of it into Italian. The contest between Augustinian scrupulous faithfulness and Hieronymite wilful nudging was very helpfully glossed by Dryden when he identified ...”

“... himself stupid at Groucho’s in the company of (or at least in the same room as) Melvyn Bragg, Umberto Eco and Gore Vidal. Amnesia has gone away and names are being profusely dropped again. Bradbury has never had much luck with the Booker, and I would guess that he’s blown it for 1992. But what is intriguing about the description of Booker 1990 is ...”

“... freeze objects by blowing on them but by his second life as Clark Kent. In an essay on Superman, Umberto Eco characterised superhero comics generically as an amalgam of ‘mythopoeic’ and ‘novelistic’ narratives: Superman is simultaneously an epic-eternal hero who exists outside time (the Man of Steel), and a ‘consumable’ romantic-novelistic ...”

“... that M&D is only an Eric and Ernie with knobs on, or just a Post-Modern romparama of the sort Umberto Eco managed so elegantly in The Name of the Rose. It’s much more densely webbed with allusiveness. And its mood is far more rigorously subjunctive: it’s an open network of potentialities, like a mutating spreadsheet or grid. It is all these ...”

“... latency we do not know. Yes, Primo Levi was born and died in the same apartment at 75 Corso Re Umberto, but I’m not sure this is a sign of neurotic closeness to his mother. He returned from Auschwitz to a war-torn Turin. As soon as he took his first job he lived, not at home, but in the bachelor quarters of the paint factory, where he wrote the first ...”

“... all, and by being young first, and then less young, we are none of us spared from belatedness. As Umberto Eco put it in Foucault’s Pendulum, To enter a university a year or two after 1968 was like being admitted to the Académie de Saint-Cyr in 1793: you felt your birth date was wrong ... You are always born under the wrong sign, and to live in this ...”

“... from the James Bond films – material, at last, that Bayard is at home with, as well as a nod to Umberto Eco’s analysis of Ian Fleming’s narrative structures. True to his initials, Simon uses his training to perform a Sherlock Holmes-like cold reading on Bayard, who responds by requisitioning him in the name of police intelligence. So begins a ...”

“... it were knocked sideways. Although critical engagement with pulp was not lacking in Italy – Umberto Eco was a pioneer – the PCI failed to connect. No creative dialectic, capable of resisting the blows of the new by transforming relations between the high and low, materialised. The case of the cinema, where Italy had above all excelled after the ...”

“... would be an anomaly in the West, if we except a single bestseller, never repeated, from Umberto Eco, though there is a close parallel in the astronomic sales and standing of China’s leading practitioner of martial arts fiction, Jin Yong, holder of various honorary positions at universities in the PRC. In Russia, it is a pattern: high-end ...”