Umberto Eco – Producer of Postmodern Knowledge

UmbertoEco is well known for his postmodern novels and literary theories, deeply delved into the poststructuralist debate of representing an a multiple meanings. Post structuralism hits the very base on which human certainties affix themselves; it calls for reconsideration of what previously taken as real on part of it resemblance to what happened in the past as it depends on evidences in the form of material and historical accounts. Poststructuralists elude the distinction between history and fiction and put the historical details in the realm of fiction. Fiction and history are human construction with the help of signs. It elucidates that signs do not end at one point or do not have a particular ontological or epistemological meaning. They require signs to express their inference and therefore do not give fixity to the meaning. The usage of signs in the history makes the history as fluid and slippery as fiction owing to uncertain meanings of signs.

The linkage between history and fiction in Umberto Eco’s writing emerges from the author’s intended description to inform the reader that the story is inspired from a lost fourteenth century manuscript. The lost manuscript leaves the reader in predicament to assume that is the true depiction of what already scripted in the lost manuscript or the construction of human imagination embedding both history and fiction together to give a perfect account of the human hardships, conditions and other issues linked to medieval period. Since the manuscript Eco discusses is lost, the ascertaining of true meaning of his text and its authenticity about the history raises questions on it. Irrespective of persistent references and claims of the true nature of lost manuscript, the reader exhibits his suspicion on its meaning.

Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction(Century Publication)

                                                    
                                                         Introduction

 With the emergence of postmodernism, an intense debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction begins. The debate gains momentum with the evolution of a kind of writing in which history and fiction infiltrate each other. The territorial independence of history and fiction ceases. My concern is the complications that emerge due to the permeation of history by fiction as the demarcations between the two disciplines begin to blur. This problematizes the relationship between history and meaning; reconfigures the representation of factual data; and redefines our conception of authenticity. It also changes our sense of the way in which history produces knowledge. History and knowledge are related to each other on account of information. History compiles factual statistics from archives and substantiates them through causes, reasons and consequences. We concede the authenticity of facts but uncertain of information owing to its presentation and narration.

 

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UMBERTO ECO: RETHINKING HISTORY AND FICTION (Century Publication)

ABSTRACT

History give an access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about the past.  What happens when a fiction writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference?   The questions become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history; they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative structure and their representation through language.

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion.  The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery.  The study also takes into account the theories of history and fiction with a specific reference to borrowing of content and characters from other sources without acknowledgment. Foucault’s Pendulum is a story of three editors who develop a PLAN from second rate manuscripts on historical incidents. A secret organization considers the fictitious PLAN to be real and kills the three editors. They borrow their content on the Templars and other secret organizations from the manuscripts. The study shows that history emerges through multiple texts. Each text has its own significance and essence; each text oozes from the other. The production of text questions the authenticity from which it has evolved. In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco sets a conversation between past and present then move to the borrowing from the past and its articulation in new framework.

Lastly, the study tries to find answers to important questions – how history resurrects in the present? How past is always present?  What are the mediums of past re-emergence in the present?  These questions are significant in view of the fact that history is written in the present. It lacks the pastness of past rather a present of the past. We get the answers to all these questions in Umberto Eco’s essay – “Towards a New Middle Ages” that explains the past never dies; it revisits the present though in different form. 

ABOUT THE BOOK

History give an access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about the past. What happens when a fiction writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference? The questions become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history; they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative structure and their representation through language.

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion. The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery. The study also takes into account the theories of history and fiction with a specific reference to borrowing of content and characters from other sources without acknowledgment. Foucault’s Pendulum is a story of three editors who develop a PLAN from second rate manuscripts on historical incidents. A secret organization considers the fictitious PLAN to be real and kills the three editors. They borrow their content on the Templars and other secret organizations from the manuscripts. The study shows that history emerges through multiple texts. Each text has its own significance and essence; each text oozes from the other. The production of text questions the authenticity from which it has evolved. In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco sets a conversation between past and present then move to the borrowing from the past and its articulation in new framework.

Lastly, the book tries to find answers to important questions – how history resurrects in the present? How past is always present? What are the mediums of past re-emergence in the present? These questions are significant in view of the fact that history is written in the present. It lacks the pastness of past rather a present of the past. We get the answers to all these questions in Umberto Eco’s essay – “Towards a New Middle Ages” that explains the past never dies; it revisits the present though in different form.

Contents

 

   I)                        Chapter 1– History and Fiction

 II)                     Chapter 2 – The Name of the Rose: A Study of History and Fiction

 III)            Chapter 3 – The Name of the Rose: Knowledge, Detection, Threats, Institutionalization and Interpretation

IV)           Chapter 4 - Foucault’s Pendulum: The Creation of Multiple Histories

V)                   Chapter 5 - “Towards of New Middle Ages”: Resurrection of Past in Present

VI)           Conclusion – Eco’ Fictional History and Sensational Fiction

Bibliography

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

The author works in the capacity of an Assistant Professor (Adhoc) at Bharati College University of Delhi, India. His research interest areas are – Postmodernism, History and Fiction, Cultural Studies, and Crime and Detection.

 

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Acquisition of Knowledge

The Name of the Rose sketches multiple lines of arguments by emphasizing a unique agenda to a specific character. William of Baskerville and Adso represent the rational amateur detective, we meet in the last nineteenth century in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Jorge represents the fundamentalist and conservative religious persona hiding the philosophy book of Aristotle – Comedy – which might prove catastrophe to the Christianity. The monastery is a home of the monks engaged in the propagation of knowledge, copying the manuscripts. Although they seem to have been involved in the protection of knowledge, yet they burn with the desire to acquire the knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge through observations dates back to the primitive age but it popularity rises in the medieval ages when two schools of thought – scholastic and humanistic – lead to fragmentation of opinions. We find this struggle and its evaluation from a detective perspective in The Name of the Rose which represents struggle between humanistic and scholastic knowledge or struggle between faith and reason. Umberto Eco takes the responsibility of judging medieval ages struggle for supremacy with the help of his inquisitor – William of Baskerville. Baskerville favors humanistic school of thought as it depends on observations. Humanism promotes individuality; emphasizes on man and his acumen. Scholastic rejects individuality and promotes the supremacy of divine authority to man’s material existence. Humanism studies nature and its phenomenon as open text which should not be obscured from masses. Humanism is a resurrection of man’s glorious past, dismantling the stronghold of institutions propagating vested interests of powerful authorities. Roman Catholic Church is a hierarchical institution running on the ideology of scholastic belief system. It eradicates doctrinal issues and unifies knowledge into a cohesive system by inculcating good and evil knowledge. It disseminates order to Roman Catholic Church dominated land. Roman Catholic Church spread its wing through monasteries where proper channels are established to disseminate rigid theological doctrines. However, the voices against the administrative power of the Church continue to pose challenges to the papal authority. These voices project humanistic belief system wherein man is empowered to interpret the knowledge as per his convenience. The reason to call voices humanistic school of thought is the generation of plethora of interpretations against unified rigid system. Medieval ages witnessed the conflict between humanism and scholastic thought of school as we found in The Name of the Rose. Monastery of Melk parallels the Roman Catholic Church working like an institution having set rules and regulations. The central. 

Umberto Eco; Rethinking History and Fiction (Century Publication)

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion.  The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery.  The study also takes into account the theories of history and fiction with a specific reference to borrowing of content and characters from other sources without acknowledgment. Foucault’s Pendulum is a story of three editors who develop a PLAN from second rate manuscripts on historical incidents. A secret organization considers the fictitious PLAN to be real and kills the three editors. They borrow their content on the Templars and other secret organizations from the manuscripts. The study shows that history emerges through multiple texts. Each text has its own significance and essence; each text oozes from the other. The production of text questions the authenticity from which it has evolved. In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco sets a conversation between past and present then move to the borrowing from the past and its articulation in new framework.

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The Name of the Rose - Sherlock Holmes of Umberto Eco in the Middle Ages

Arthur Conan Doyle carries the tradition of crime and criminals along with deep observation methods to answer the mysteries that require human intelligence. The observational method strengthens inductive and deductive reasoning of both human generated processes and natural phenomenon. It is the core analytical instrument used by detective to sift relevant from irrelevant. Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries by observing facts. Holmes uses inductive reasoning to create profiles of culprits. Dr. Watson prepares a chart of Holmes’ limitations, giving an impression that Holmes scores high in scientific knowledge and decent on sensational literature. However, scientific knowledge does not incorporate pure science. Science assists in deduction from the chunk; it segregates essential from inessential. Holmes possesses proper knowledge a detective should have to distinguish between apparent and hidden reality. The distinction between apparent and hidden reality is made by drawing inference of a set of observations which reciprocate with a premise to begin investigation. The premise does not necessarily yield fruitful results; it is an assumption to work on. Holmes moves from specific details to general argument and from general to specific. Under these rules of inductive and deductive reasoning, detective should not have an in-depth knowledge but sufficient to prove his argument on rational ground. Following the same line of argument, Umberto Eco constructs his postmodern detective fiction on inductive and deductive reasoning. Eco commences his most famous text The Name of the Rose by highlighting the significance of inductive and deductive reasoning. In the beginning of the text, William of Baskerville and Adso identifies the breed of the horse without even seeing it ones. Adso and the cellarer of Melk monastery are curious to know how Baskerville identifies the breed of the horse. Baskerville elucidates that he reads the signs of nature and relate them to his observational knowledge. Baskerville employs analytical deductive reasoning to ascertain the breed of horse by reading the marks left on the ground. Baskerville is not an expert yet profound reader to understand the difference between an apparent and hidden reality. Baskerville does not recollect the name of Aristotle’s second book, reflecting his loose end. Eco does not develop Baskerville a perfect figure having every kind of knowledge. Baskerville gains knowledge through observation, induction, deduction, and rationality.

 Umberto Eco: Rethinking of History and Fiction (Century Publication)

 History give an access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about the past.  What happens when a fiction writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference?   The questions become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history; they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative structure and their representation through language.

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion.  The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery.

Lastly, the study tries to find answers to important questions – how history resurrects in the present? How past is always present?  What are the mediums of past re-emergence in the present?  These questions are significant in view of the fact that history is written in the present. It lacks the pastness of past rather a present of the past. We get the answers to all these questions in Umberto Eco’s essay – “Towards a New Middle Ages” that explains the past never dies; it revisits the present though in different form.

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Dissolution of History and Fiction in Postmodern Detective Fiction

Is it very hard to make the distinction between history and fiction? Why has history become the bone of contention in the postmodern age? How does the postmodern detective fiction lead to uproar? The postmodern elements in the works of Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum, and Travels in Hyperreality draws our attention to the multiple contentions of history, myth and fiction.  

 

When we study The Name of the Rose in context of postmodernist theory of history and fiction, we find that Eco prioritizes concerns to present the changing social, political and religious spheres with the help of fiction. It also leads us back into the domain of detective fiction wherein the world of Conan Doyle emerges. Fiction grounds on imagination that helps in the construction of narrative picture and history gives the picture of past. Fiction infiltrates into the territory of facts with the presentation of verified data in the form of names, factions, dates, and incidents. This crossing of the boundary blurs the demarcation of history and fiction as the reader finds himself incapable to treat the content fact or imaginatively constructed. Linda Hutcheon argues that the writing of postmodernists is best represented by those works of historiographic metafiction which self consciously distort history. This distortion of history could be accomplished through various means such as blending of “history and fantasy.”  Postmodern historical novels incorporate historical documents, events and historical personages into the fictional worlds of their works, drawing attention at the same time to this process. Linda Hutcheon in her Poetics of Postmodernism labels postmodern historical novels as “historiographic metafictions” since they thematize the theory of contemporary historiography and problematize the distinction between history and fiction. She explains her reason for such a label thus: “[historiographic metafiction] puts into question, at the same time as it exploits, the grounding of historical knowledge in the real past. This is why I have been calling this historiographic metafiction.” [1]

 

The movie adaptation of The Name of the Rose directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud starring Sean Connery as William of Baskerville and Christian Slater as Adso of Melk help in understanding the issue more deeply. The theory and practice of historiographic metafictions with reference to detective fiction and post modernism also help in the study of text and its adaptation keeping in view the development in the field of literature with the involvement of media.

Umberto Eco: Rethinking of History andFiction

The debate on the substitutive nature of history and fiction becomes important when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which is drawn from a manuscript, narrating a story of monastery from the fourteenth century. The manuscript is based on a real incident and Eco employs its content to write the book incorporating real characters and organizations. He sheds light on the problems people faced owing to their religious positions, and how science proved detrimental to religion.  The book exhibits the significance of rational thinking and theory of deduction (primarily used by Sherlock Holmes) to access knowledge. The study has discovered that history is a source of knowledge about the past which uses scientific methods as a detective employs to solve a mystery.  The study also takes into account the theories of history and fiction with a specific reference to borrowing of content and characters from other sources without acknowledgment. Foucault’s Pendulum is a story of three editors who develop a PLAN from second rate manuscripts on historical incidents. A secret organization considers the fictitious PLAN to be real and kills the three editors. They borrow their content on the Templars and other secret organizations from the manuscripts. The study shows that history emerges through multiple texts. Each text has its own significance and essence; each text oozes from the other. The production of text questions the authenticity from which it has evolved. In Foucault’s Pendulum, Eco sets a conversation between past and present then move to the borrowing from the past and its articulation in new framework.

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[1] Linda Hutcheon, The Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. 1989 p. 92.

Book Review - The Silkworm by J.K. Rowling

 

Source – Live Mint and The Wall Street Journal

It had taken a single reckless tweet to blow the cover of the real identity of author Robert Galbraith, weeks after the first Cormoran Strike mystery, The Cuckoo’s Calling, was published last year. But the best literary minds, it would appear from the second instalment in the series, are ingenious enough to reinforce a conceit that has already been busted, if only by using devices that are loaded with sly, and at times even blunt, symbolism. In The Silkworm, J.K. Rowling, writing for the second time as Galbraith, plays truant with the very image of the androgynous author she had failed to protect after the publication of The Cuckoo’s Calling. She repeatedly invokes gender ambiguity in the new novel to poke fun, often viciously, at male ego as well as female vanity, and eventually turns it into a key vital to the detection of the crime around which the plot turns. One of the characters in The Silkworm is, literally, a hermaphrodite, while another is called Orlando, a reference to the gender-bending protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel. Then there is someone called Epicoene, a nod to Ben Jonson’s protagonist in the play of the same name. Nothing less inventive could be expected of the creator of the Harry Potter series, in which magic and metaphor, wit and wizardry, keep playing off each other, taking the reader on a roller-coaster ride of clarity and confusion. The effect of reading The Silkworm is no less heady, though its plot unfolds with the stately pace of its predecessor. As in The Cuckoo’s Calling, it takes a while for the crime to be committed. Private investigator Strike, the one-legged veteran of the war in Afghanistan and illegitimate offspring of a rock star, stumbles upon the corpse of the very person whose disappearance he is employed to investigate. The case, though not as glamorous as his previous one involving the death of supermodel Lula Landry, is compelling nonetheless, simply for being as macabre as it is. ‘Novelist Owen Quine is found dead, tied up with ropes—à la Fifty Shades Of Grey—on a dining table, set for seven, in a house that he co-owned with a former friend, who also happens to be a writer, though far more successful than him. But it feels like an understatement to call Quine merely dead. For his killer not only takes care to bash him on the head well and truly with a metallic doorstopper, but to also tear open his belly and pull out his guts, before ending with a thorough dousing of the body, and nearly everything else in the house, with the severely corrosive hydrochloric acid. The textbook examples of such murders can frequently be found in 17th and 18th century Jacobean revenge tragedies. Unsurprisingly, lines from the plays of Thomas Dekker and John Webster appear liberally in the epigraphs to most of the 50-odd chapters that comprise The Silkworm. The motive behind this spectacular ritual of violence, it seems, is an incriminating manuscript that Quine had finished, in which he spilled the dirt on more than half of literary London, and which his agent had inadvertently circulated among a couple of publishers, some of whose thinly veiled sexual exploits (or failures in that regard, as the case may be) happen to figure prominently all over the story. Densely allegorical, like a perverse version of 17th century writer John Bunyan’s novel The Pilgrim’s Progress, Quine’s work is called Bombyx Mori, the scientific name of the silkworm, which, as one of the characters explains to Strike, Quine had probably used as a metaphor for the figure of the writer. Like the larva that has to be boiled alive before one can extract the fine silk, the author must “go through agonies to get at the good stuff”. For a remorseless cad and philanderer like Quine, with a gift for poisoning almost all his friendships, such gratuitous cruelty is as seamlessly woven into his art as his life. In Bombyx Mori, Quine seems to have surpassed his imagination for nastiness. He gives his characters names that insinuate, in no uncertain terms, their innermost vices: Phallus Impudicus, Vainglorious, Succuba, Effigy, Epicoene, Tick—the list is a testimony to his prodigal appetite for kink. Much of the detection work involves a close reading of the text, sieving through the imagery for clues embedded in it, in the way A.S. Byatt’s Possession or Umberto Eco’s The Name Of The Rose requires its readers to do. Mischievously, Rowling pulls off quite the same trick as Quine in her own novel, which bears the same title as Quine’s, except that hers is in English, not Latin. With this subtle twist, she doubles the perspective of her narrative, allowing one plot to mirror the other, and leaving the reader to negotiate between the two parallel levels of storytelling: the framing novel (Rowling’s), and the meta-novel (Quine’s) nestled into the core of it. But the triumph of The Silkworm goes beyond its ability to sustain a complex and acutely cerebral structure. Rather, its pleasure is multiplied many times over by Rowling’s ability to humanize her characters, especially the unlikely detective and his assistant. The chemistry between the two seems to have deepened, though not necessarily lost its darker edges, in this book. Having a dead writer at the centre of the plot also allows Rowling to take persistent digs at contemporary publishing—especially at the industry’s craven indulgence of mediocrity for the sake of profit, the triumph of online self-publishing over sound editorial control, and the alacrity with which people tend to take offence at being turned into fodder for somebody else’s fiction. The hint of a celebrity scandal in the plot also allows her to return to one of her favourite bête-noires: the intrusive and insidious operations of modern media. The overwhelming impression is that of publishing being an all-boys’ game, where the rules are set by a bunch of maniacal men—be they writers or editors—feeding off one another’s weaknesses, while women are left on the fringes, fuming with impotent rage. Between these two extremes lurks the figure of the hermaphrodite, the golden mean blessed with the best, and the worst, creative energies of the male and the female, a persona that seems to find a rousing validation in the figure of “Robert Galbraith”.
 

For more information read -  Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction

 

Abstract

 

History give an access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about the past.  What happens when a fiction writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference?   The questions become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history; they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative structure and their representation through language.

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Norma Bouchard - Eco and Popular Culture

 

source - New Essays on Umberto Eco edited by Peter Bondanella

 

 

Umberto Eco has exhibited great devotion to the high canon of Western literature and to popular literature. Eco has produced a significant proportion of works which can be look at the transition of in the people perception on the aesthetic as well as the populist aspect of low-brow literature. The evaluation of popular culture artifacts reveals that the division of high culture and low culture deeply rooted and openly admitted in the late nineteenth century and the beginning of twentieth century “reflect the larger epistemological changes that ensued when the resistance to commercialized mass culture on the part of an elitist, aristocratic strand of modern art theory gave way to a postmodernist blurring of the divide between different types of discourses.”[1] Bouchard believes that Eco from the beginning of his career had a strong opinion that high and low art are complementary and interchangeable although a strong opinion of escapism regarded by elitist. What Eco has achieved through his fictional and non-fictional works is to firmly establish the Postmodern concept of “Intertextuality” – Nothing is New - to show that the writers or critics only innovate from the already existed texts. Bouchard also admit that the bibliography of Umberto Eco, “Andreas Huyssen calls the “Great Divide”3 and therefore documents the different positions on popular culture taken by two very different twentieth-century views on the subject: modern art theory, on the one hand, with its emphasis on originality, novelty, and innovation; and postmodern aesthetics, on the other hand, that champions repetition, iteration, intertextual citation, and replay.”[2] Umberto Eco remains neutral on the art neither he criticizes that is highbrow in nature nor valorizes all forms of mass culture. For him, the classics hold as much significance as the popular art does.  For instance, Eco’s publications between Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals (1964) and Invernizio, Serao, Liala (1979) reflect a predominantly modernist approach to culture. How do we distinguish between Modernism and Postmodernism is a contentious issue but critics have agreed on certain parameters that popular art forms could be defined as products of a bourgeois, capitalist- driven culture that seeks to provide the public with imaginary resolutions to real, social contradictions. Eco has examined the works “within two categories: popular nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels; and various forms of mass communication widespread in twentieth-century culture, such as cartoons, songs, television, and films.The first group of works is discussed in great detail in The Superman of the Masses and in Invernizio, Serao, Liala.”[3]  Bouchard further argues that the working of Eco on mass media, cartoon and other modes of electronic communications crops from his belief that “in the course of the twentieth century, the novel’s popular appeal as a genre diminishes. Narrative migrates into the newer media of films, television, songs, and cartoons. The analysis of these new forms is at the center of Apocalyptic and Integrated Intellectuals.”[4] Since Eco writes in the time period when Postmodernism dominates other forms, his art is “hybrid incorporation of high- and lowbrow culture in The Name of the Rose and subsequent novels. their author is still far from relinquishing a desire for originality of vision in both the semantic and formal structures of his work.”[5] The Name of the Rose might easily be accused of being the quintessential work of Kitsch. Bouchard ends the debate on the respective position of both high culture and low culture each having its own importance in the background of time period when a specific work is produced.

 

 

 

Norma Bouchard is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Italian at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of Celine, Gadda, Beckett: Experimental Writers of the 1930s (2000); editor of Risorgimento in Modern Italian Culture: Revisiting the Nineteenth- Century Past in History, Narrative, and Cinema (2005); and co-editor of Umberto Eco’s Alternative: The Politics of Culture and the Ambiguities of Interpretation (1998).

 

Read more - Umberto Eco: Rethinking History and Fiction

 

Abstract

 

History give an access to unknown past through narrative structure scaffolding on facts and manuscripts drawn from achieves. These manuscripts and detailed accounts corroborate with ruined archeological sites with inscriptions and arts. Thus, history represents rational and objective truth that answers to all the queries of people about the past.  What happens when a fiction writer chooses stories and characters from history? If a fictional story is based on a historical incident and characters, what is the difference between fiction and history? Does the reader not find himself cheated? What stand does the reader take with respect to fiction and history? These questions inform about the substitutive nature of history and fiction that have infiltrated into each other territories. Does it really obliterate the difference?   The questions become easier to answer if we define history and fiction in their respective territories. In fact, neither history is fictitious nor fiction is history; they do not pose a challenge to each other only inform about narrative structure and their representation through language.

For more reading, visit -

http://centurypublications.co.in/index.php?route=product/product&product_id=3507

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[1] Norm Bouchard, “Eco and Popular Culture” ed. Peter Bondanella New Essays on Umberto Eco, Cambridge University Press. 2009.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.