Umberto Eco, The Da Vinci Code, and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture

This book provides a philosophical overview of Umberto Eco's historical and cultural development as a unique, internationally recognized public intellectual who communicates his ideas to both an academic and a popular audience. It describes Eco's intellectual development from his childhood during World War II and student involvement as a Catholic youth activist and scholar of the Middle Ages, to his early writings on the "openness" of modern works such as Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Merrell also explores Eco's pioneering role in semiotics and his later career as a novelist.

List of contents

1. The Intermediate Thinker.- 2. The Intellectual Species.- 3. A Medievalist in Hibernation.- 4. The Exiled Heretic.- 5. The Art of Adventure:  Joyce, Pareyson, and the Open Work.- 6. The Gruppo 63 and the Counter-Culture Movement.- 7.  The Aesthetic Worlds of Superman and Charlie Brown.- 8.  The Semiotic Species:  A Grand Unified Theory of Culture.- 9. The Ethics of Interpretation and the Model Reader.- 10.  Travels in the Fictional Labyrinth.

Report

"The book's style and focus remain professional throughout. ... the author is nimble and shrewd in his explanations of Eco's works and his desire to foster a critical consciousness in his readers. ... this work is essential for anyone with more than a passing interest in Eco." (Andre van Loon, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 47 (02), June, 2018)

Product details

• Authors: Douglass Merrell
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 13.05.2018
• EAN: 9783319854823
• ISBN: 978-3-31-985482-3
• No. of pages: 296
• Dimensions: 147 mm x 210 mm x 22 mm
• Weight: 396 g
• Illustrations: VI, 296 p.
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Philosophy > General, dictionaries; B, History, History of Ideas, Linguistics, Language and Literature, Language: reference & general, Literary studies: general, Religion and Philosophy, Literature, Modern—20th century, Twentieth-Century Literature, Literary studies: c 1900 to c 2000, Philology, Intellectual life—History, Intellectual Studies, Continental Philosophy