See Joseph Frank, «Spatial form in modern literature,» Sewanee Review (1945).
«Lingering in the woods,» in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1994), 49–73.
See my «Jerusalem and the Temple as signs in medieval culture,» in G. Manetti (ed.), Knowledge through Signs (Paris: Brepols, 1996), pp. 329–44.
I quote from the most recent edition of his Estetica (Milan: Bompiani, 1988), though this passage has remained unchanged since the first edition was published in 1954.
I have often wondered whether Pareysons idea of the stopgap was inspired by some previous discussion. We know how devoid his Estetica is of notes, and his references are often generic. On this particular point, I have not found any reference or quotation in his notes. Taking a deconstructionist’s privilege, and going against any sense of fidelity to the text, and therefore against all the teachings of my Maestro, I note that the dictionaries give also «cuneo» (wedge) as a definition of «zeppa!» and I have decided to see in his choice of the latter nontechnical term an unconscious homage to his hometown (of Cuneo in Piedmont).
Linda Hutcheon, «Ecos Echoes: Ironizing the Postmodern,» in N. Bouchard and V.
Pravadelli, eds., Umberto Eco’s Alternative (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); Linda Hutcheon, A
Poetics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1988); Brian McHale, Constructing
Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1992); Remo Ceserani, «Ecos (Postmodernist fiction,» in Bouchard and Pravadelli, 148 ff.
Charles A. Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (Wisbech: Balding and Mansell, 1978), 6.
Charles A. Jencks, What Is Post-Modernism? (London: Art and Design, 1986), 14–15. See also Charles A. Jencks, ed., The Post-Modem Reader (London: Academy Editions; New York: St. Martins Press, 1992).
For an idea of how misleading this practice has been, I refer to the essay in this same volume, «A Reading of the Paradiso» (above, pp. 16–22).
Franco Musarra, ed., Eco infabula (Florence: Cesati, 2002).
«Eco’s Echoes: Ironizing the (Postmodern,» op. cit, 171.
«Eco e il postmoderno consapevole,» in Raccontare il postmoderno (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1997), 180–200.
«Poetics in particular, language in general,» in Poetry (1961); later in Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, Method (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 32.
«Aristotelian Poetics as a Science of Literature,» 1984, now «Aristotle: Poetics and Criticism,» in Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 11–32.
Aristotle’s Poetics (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1957).
Time and Narrative, vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 2.
See his Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine, now in its 4th edition (The Hague and New York: Mouton, 1980).
See Barthes, «Introduction to the Structuralist Analysis of Narratives»), in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), 251–95 (251–52).
On the contrary, the cultures that have produced the novel have always produced theories of plot. Going back to the rejection of Aristotle that characterized Italian culture after the seventeenth century, I do not want to stick my neck out by deciding what the cause or effect was, but it is certainly true that for centuries Italian culture did not produce either good novels or good theories of plot. Although it was a great culture for storytelling in the form of the novella, starting with Boccaccio, Italian literature produced novels much later than other cultures. We have quite a vast tradition of baroque novels, but without any peaks of excellence (even though at that time Aristotle was still being followed), and then nothing of interest until the nineteenth century, where, however, there are few Italian titles one would rank alongside the Dickenses, Balzacs, and Tolstoys. It is true that the novel is the product of bourgeois culture and that Italy had a burgeoning bourgeoisie in Boccaccio’s time, but it did not have a modern bourgeoisie until much later than the rest of Europe. But whether this was cause or effect, it did not have theories of plot either. It is for this reason that Italy (which today has excellent writers of detective fiction, and also had two or three such authors in the period before the Second World War) was not a land where the detective story emerged or developed; for the detective story is nothing but the Poetics boiled down to its essential coordinates, a sequence of events (pragmata) whose wires have been crossed, and the plot tells us how the detective unravels them.
«Des accidents dans les sciences dites humaines,» in Du Sens II (Paris: Seuil, 1983).
(New York: Longman, 1937).
See, for instance, Robert Langbaum, «Aristotle and modern literature,» Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism (September 1956).
The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 1.2.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980). See also George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Charles Fillmore, «The Case for Case,» in E. Bach et al., eds., Universals in Linguistic Theory (New York: Holt, 1968); Manfred Bierwisch, «On Classifying Semantic Features,» in D. D. Steinberg and L. A. Jakobovits, eds., Semantics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).
Eugene Charniak, «A Partial Taxonomy of Knowledge about Actions,» Institute for Semantic and Cognitive Studies. Castagnola. Working Papers 13 (1975).
Summa Theol. I. 79.8; Contra Gentiles, 4.46.
Collected Papers, 2. 330.
Inventing the Flat Earth (New York: Praeger, 1991).
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1906).
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961).
(New York: Appleton, 1896).
F. S. Marvin, «Science and the Unity of Mankind,» in Charles Singer, ed., Studies in the History and Method of the Sciences (2 vols.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), II, 344–58 (352).
See, also for what follows, Gioia Zaganelli, La lettera del Prete Gianni (Parma: Pratiche, 1990).
See Umberto Eco, «Fakes and Forgeries,» in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 174–202.
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London: Roudedge, 2000).
I know that I took up this story both in Foucault’s Pendulum and in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, but it is always worth repeating, and unfortunately the story can never be retold often enough. As always, the evidence derives largely, apart from my own personal researches into the «roman feuilleton,» from Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 1996), and from that inexhaustible source of anti-Semitic arguments, Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (London: Boswell, 1924).
Philip Fauth, Hörbigers Gladd-Kosmogonie (Kaiserslautern: Hermann Kayser Verlag, 1913).
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, trans. Rollo Myers (London: Souvenir, 2001), II, 5–7.
See, for instance, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism
(Wellingborough: Aquarian Press, 1985), or René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés’sécrètes (Paris: Grasset, 1969).
For instance, Gerard Kniper, of the Mount Palomar observatory, in an article that came out in Popular Astronomy in 1946, and Willy Ley, who had worked on the V-1 in Germany, in his article «Pseudoscience in Naziland,» in Astounding Science Fiction 39 (1947).
In 1926 Admiral Byrd flew over the North Pole and in 1929 over the South Pole without sighting any hole giving access to the center of the earth, but a huge literature has arisen on Byrd’s flights (just search for «Byrd» on the Internet), where various bizarre spirits interpret his findings in exactly the opposite sense, seeing them as proof that the access holes exist. This is also because, if you photograph these zones during the day, you notice a dark zone that is the portion of the Arctic Circle that is never shone on by the sun during the winter months. Those who want maps showing the polar conduits leading to the center of the Earth should look at sites like www.v-j-enterprises.com/holearth.html or www.ourhollowearth.com/Polar Opn.htm. Those who want to penetrate more deeply into the hollow earths archipelago can visit countless sites, among which I will cite only www.healthresearcharchbooks.comlcategorieslhollowearth.html and hohle-erde.de/body_l-he.htme. Of course, you cant believe everything you read.
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), 123.
(ArIes: Actes Sud, 1994).
Maria Corti, «I giochi del Piano,» in L’Indice dei Libri del Mese 10 (1988), 14–15.
See «Fakes and Forgeries,» in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 174–202. See also in this volume my inaugural lecture on forgeries (pp. 272–301), which perhaps, given its date (1994), constitutes the first nucleus of Baudolino.
Especially Gioia Zaganelli, ed., La lettera del Prete Gianni (Parma: Pratiche, 1990).
In How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 234–278.
«Il segno della poesia e il segno della prosa,» in Sugli specchi (Milan: Bompiani, 1985).
