Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
|
Loading... No title
Work InformationSix Walks in the Fictional Woods by Umberto Eco
   Italian Literature (442) SHOULD Read Books! (185) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) blueisthenewpink | Jul 2, 2022 |  Eco explores the unspoken agreements between writer and reader of fiction. If this is a translation into English, then the translation is marvelous. ( ) KENNERLYDAN | Jul 11, 2021 | Six Walks in the Fictional Woods records a series of lectures that Professor Eco delivered in 1993. The concern is narrative and the distance between fictional truth and actual or historical truth. This is but one target in the copse of topics. The ideal reader is but another. Joyce is quoted saying that the ideal reader for [b:Finnegans Wake|11013|Finnegans Wake|James Joyce|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1336408055s/11013.jpg|322098] would have an ideal insomnia. There are also distinctions made between a level one read (pleasure seeker) and a second level of reader which is a more serious bent, one seeking verisimilitude amidst a tangle of symbols and allusions. These are enjoyable tangents across the face of fiction, A scholar's wink to the necessity of narrative. Eco states so at the collection's conclusion. "It offers us the opportunity to employ limitlessly our faculties for perceiving the world and reconstructing the past." (  ) jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 | It's great to just read about writing, to read about fiction, because really it's all I want to talk about in my day-to-day life. I like what Eco puts words around in regard to the reader's suspension of reality. How we'll accept any internally-consistent world, how we will trust the author and the story in a way we wouldn't outside of the novel. He analyses the rules and expectations of writing that make it work and the thing is that it's all stuff the reader implicitly knows. I was reminded of the course I took in cognitive linguistics where we spent ages discussing why the human brain understood something in a second. We know how stories work even if we have never tried to describe how we know, or what it is that we're responding to, or anything. I can see people feeling frustrated by an in-depth discussion of something that seems "obvious" or automatic, but I love it whether or not it matters. I love the evocation of living within the works, how the places can take on their own reality. It really seems as if Eco paces through those fictional woods and that we go with him. I also love the discussion of characters that take on their own reality, as its something that's fascinated me for a while now. What is it that made those characters alive? It's also interesting reading this book after having read [b:The Prague Cemetery|10314376|The Prague Cemetery|Umberto Eco|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1327902035s/10314376.jpg|14511050], because in the final lecture you can see that he is heading very clearly towards that book, and might have already started writing it. ( )1  likecymbeline | Apr 1, 2017 | ) jwhenderson | Aug 13, 2012 | no reviews | add a review
Belongs to Publisher SeriesCharles Eliot Norton Lectures (1992-1993)
"Come stroll with me through the leafy glades of narrative ..." With Umberto Eco as companion and guide, who could resist such an invitation? In this exhilarating book, we accompany him as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms. How does a text signal the type of reader it wants, and how does it "stage" for us, through its style and voice, a certain version of the author? What is the relation between this "model reader" and "model author"? How does narrative lead us on, persuade us to lose ourselves in its depths?
The range of Eco's examples is astonishing - from fairy tales, through Flaubert, Poe, and Manzoni, to Ian Fleming, Mickey Spillane, and Casablanca. In a detailed analysis of one of his favorite texts, Gerard de Nerval's Sylvie, Eco examines the uses of temporal ambiguity, demystifying the "mists" in the literary forest. In another chapter, he takes detective fiction and pornography as a basis for discussing narrative pace - strategic speeding up and slowing down - and the relationship between real time and narrative time. And in yet another chapter, we follow Eco as he shadows the musketeer D'Artagnan through the streets of seventeenth-century Paris, a trail that leads us to the uncertain boundary between story and history. Fiction is parasitically dependent on reality; but reality, too, feeds on fiction.
Here, the book reveals its serious side. What are the implications for society when the line between reality and fiction becomes blurred? How are stories ("plots" in the most insidious sense of the word) constructed over the course of time? In order to be responsible citizens of the world, Eco shows, we must be skilled and incisive readers. Getting lost in the blurry region where the real and the fictional merge can be a disturbing experience. But Eco's unerring sense of direction gives us confidence, encourages us to explore. We learn how to be better readers - how to question texts, even as they are subtly influencing us. In Eco's company, this dark forest becomes a realm of curiosity, discovery, and sheer delight. No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)808.3Literature By Topic Rhetoric and anthologies Rhetoric of fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.98)
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Wikipedia in English (4)
2