Umberto Eco - Misreadings (1993)

Umberto Eco - Misreadings (Harcourt Brace & Co., 1993). Translated by William Weaver.

ISBN: 0156607522 | 192 pages | PDF


These 15 essays by semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) originally appeared between 1959 and 1972 in an Italian literary magazine, Il Verri. They are actually satires, pastiches of publishing, art and literature, in which Eco pokes fun at the over-sophisticated, the over-academic, and the over-intellectual and makes penetrating comments about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde.

Reviews

"The essays are actually satires, pastiches of publishing, art and literature. Typical is the first piece, a parody of Nabokov's Lolita in which the protagonist becomes obsessed with a white-haired old woman. In a work on Columbus's voyage, revised for American publication, the admiral's landing is covered by the likes of Dan Rather, Alastair Cook, MacNeil/Lehrer and Johnny Carson. Publishers' readers' reports for Don Quixote, Dante's Divine Comedy, even the Bible, reject them all." -- Publisher's Weekly

"A scintillating collection of writings." -- Los Angeles Times