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[(Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's 'The Name of the Rose')] [Author: M. Thomas Inge] published on
The original essays gathered in this book make a beginning at exploring the cultural significance of "The Name of the Rose" in terms of its backgrounds and literary contexts. Eco's novel is examined in the light of several of the traditions from which it draws: theories of detective fiction, comedy, postmodernism, the apocalypse, semiotics, and literary criticism. The authors from a variety of language disciplines frequently draw on Eco's own scholarly commentaries to elucidate the novel." The Name of the Rose" was published in English in the United States in 1983 and remained on the best-seller list for forty weeks. Paperback publication rights brought the highest price ever paid for a translation, and in 1986 it became a major motion picture. Written by a distinguished professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, the novel was an immediate bestseller in Italy in 1980 and was subsequently translated into twenty languages to universal acclaim.The question all this raises is, how can such a novel be so popular--a detective set in a medieval monastery, which entertains at the same time as it deals with theology, history, politics, humanism, comedy, literary criticism, and just about everything else that makes up culture and society? Is it possible that a popular piece of fiction, accessible to general readers, can also address complex and profound ideas? This volume of essays on the celebrated novel is the first of several books to be written in appreciation of Eco's remarkable accomplishment. It has the distinction also of including a foreword written by Eco himself in response to the essays, certainly one of the few times when the author has agreed to critique his critics. In addition, this collection contains a bibliography of Eco criticism.Just as "The Name of the Rose" has something for everyone, so too does this book of critical essays. Scholar, teacher, student, and general reader alike will benefit from the light it casts on a contemporary literary phenomenon.
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First published May 31, 1988
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September 16, 2020
"Like Adso, the wiser we become, the more foolish we feel."
An outstanding and read-worthy collection of selected essays on Eco's The Name of the Rose which prove to be much helpful in the investigation and decoding of the novel by the detective reader.
Prerequisites (better to have read these in advance):
The Name of the Rose
Postscript to the Name of the Rose
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
Selected literary essays of Umberto Eco (optional)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Zadig (optional)
Bellow are some spoiler free excerpts from the essays included in this book to give you a gist of the topics that each would explore:
TRADITIONS:
1. To Make Truth Laugh: Eco’s The Name of the Rose - Hans Kellner
Etymology and onomastics, the study of the origins of words and names, were fundamental categories of thought in the Middle Ages, in which the ancient question whether the names of things originated in “nature” or in “convention” was a living debate, usually decided in favor of nature.
Nomination is itself a labyrinth; The Name of the Rose makes naming most important and the lack of a name a deep tragedy.
2. Apocalyptic Visions and Visionaries in The Name of the Rose - Lois Parkinson Zamora
Apocalypse is eschatological; it is concerned with the end of the present age, the Last Judgment, and the age to follow.
Umberto Eco has often observed that what joins the world depicted in the novel to our own is precisely our shared sense of impending apocalypse, our common perception of living in a dangerous time of transition.
3. The Name of the Rose as a Postmodern Novel - Mark Parker
Eco locates part of the problem of defining and describing mass culture in the critics themselves. According to Eco, they tend to ask the wrong question. Implicitly or explicitly, these critics ask, “Is mass culture good or bad?” when the real question is somewhat different. As Eco himself puts it, “When the present situation of an industrial society makes mass communication a fact, what can be done to render these means of communication capable of transmitting cultural values?”; In other words, mass culture is controlled by economics. It moves to the logic of profit, and it is prepared without the benefit of intellectuals.
Eco suggests that what mass culture needs is instructions for use. According to him, nothing is wrong with the distraction and diversion it affords. The difficulty lies in the fact that, for most people, such offerings alone constitute culture and exert a strongly reactionary force in society.
At the end of his theoretical treatment of mass culture, Eco makes what in retrospect is a wryly proleptic comment: “I believe that there can be a novel intended at once as a work of entertainment, a consumer item, and an aesthetically valid work capable of providing original, not kitsch, values.” This double intention fits well The Name of the Rose.
DETECTIVES:
4. The Hounding of Baskerville: Allusion and Apocalypse in Eco’s The Name of the Rose - Michael Cohen
Eco’s allusions to particular detectives, detective writers, and stories in The Name of the Rose are not merely homage or creative borrowing, though they are both these things. What Eco is doing amounts to a novel form of literary history.
5. Eco’s Conflation of Theology and Detection in The Name of the Rose - Joan Del Fattore
A mystery story on two levels, The Name of the Rose presents a series of murders by unknown perpetrators and a series of debates about God, Christ, and the created world.
6. The Detective Novel and the Defense of Humanism – Pierre L. Horn
The name of the Rose, is not only a crime story devoted to the methodical and gradual discovery of the exact circumstances of mysterious events through rational means (though much of our enjoyment comes from its whodunit qualities) but a defense of enlightened humanism as well.
7. Holmes Goes to Carnival: Embarrassing the Signifier in Eco’s AntiDetective Novel – H. Aram Veeser
Critics have generally thought that detective fiction guarantees the triumph of clarity over ambiguity. This essay focuses on the ideological effects stemming from this essential movement toward clarity.
Eco has himself theorized about detective fiction, which, he says, usually bifurcates into “fundamental moves” and “incidental moves.” Eco’s Rose might be taken as an exemplary case of “incidental moves” assuming greater importance than “fundamental” ones. Such a strategy was perhaps to be expected from an author steeped in semiotic theory and known for his deconstructions/literary-critical maneuvers that transmogrify the marginal into the essential and deny fixed oppositions between incidental and fundamental aspects of texts.
SEMIOTICS:
8. Sign and De-Sign: Medieval and Modern Semiotics in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose - Helen T. Bennett
Since antiquity, Western thinkers have consistently been concerned with the relationship between signs and words, on one hand, and the external reality they represent, on the other.
William of Ockham sought to distinguish questions of ontology from questions of terminology. Modern semiotics focuses on the processes of sign production and perception. To formulate their theories, both Ockham and Eco explore, one, how humans perceive and, two, how language affects and records (accurately or inaccurately) the process of perception.
9. Traversing the Labyrinth: The Structures of Discovery in Eco’s the Name of the Rose - Jocelyn Mann
In The Name of the Rose, its reader’s metafictional exploration is a rhizome labyrinth—a mode of conjecture consisting of a semiotic scanning of a novel that can be understood and enjoyed without it but with which the reader who undertakes it, the writer who devises it, and the work itself are enlarged, redefined, and enriched. This is the ironic game of the postmodern novel.
To understand its significance and the role it plays in the universe of the novel and the universe of human culture, a longer look at the characteristics of the rhizome is necessary.
like its evocative title, The Name of the Rose carries a kind of immortality; not in the fixed and everlasting divinity of an absolute Truth but in its revelation of the endless dance of interpretation in Eco’s semiotic world of infinite possibility.
10. Answering Idle Questions: Open and Closed Readers in The Name of the Rose - Deborah Parker
To designate a novel “open” or “closed” in an absolute sense implies that these categories are attributes of the work alone, not indicators of a method of reading or of a reader’s attitude toward a text
In The Name of the Rose the categories of open and closed work on two levels—that of form and that of content—in a way that might be described as paradoxical.
An outstanding and read-worthy collection of selected essays on Eco's The Name of the Rose which prove to be much helpful in the investigation and decoding of the novel by the detective reader.
Prerequisites (better to have read these in advance):
The Name of the Rose
Postscript to the Name of the Rose
Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings
Selected literary essays of Umberto Eco (optional)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
Zadig (optional)
Bellow are some spoiler free excerpts from the essays included in this book to give you a gist of the topics that each would explore:
TRADITIONS:
1. To Make Truth Laugh: Eco’s The Name of the Rose - Hans Kellner
Etymology and onomastics, the study of the origins of words and names, were fundamental categories of thought in the Middle Ages, in which the ancient question whether the names of things originated in “nature” or in “convention” was a living debate, usually decided in favor of nature.
Nomination is itself a labyrinth; The Name of the Rose makes naming most important and the lack of a name a deep tragedy.
2. Apocalyptic Visions and Visionaries in The Name of the Rose - Lois Parkinson Zamora
Apocalypse is eschatological; it is concerned with the end of the present age, the Last Judgment, and the age to follow.
Umberto Eco has often observed that what joins the world depicted in the novel to our own is precisely our shared sense of impending apocalypse, our common perception of living in a dangerous time of transition.
3. The Name of the Rose as a Postmodern Novel - Mark Parker
Eco locates part of the problem of defining and describing mass culture in the critics themselves. According to Eco, they tend to ask the wrong question. Implicitly or explicitly, these critics ask, “Is mass culture good or bad?” when the real question is somewhat different. As Eco himself puts it, “When the present situation of an industrial society makes mass communication a fact, what can be done to render these means of communication capable of transmitting cultural values?”; In other words, mass culture is controlled by economics. It moves to the logic of profit, and it is prepared without the benefit of intellectuals.
Eco suggests that what mass culture needs is instructions for use. According to him, nothing is wrong with the distraction and diversion it affords. The difficulty lies in the fact that, for most people, such offerings alone constitute culture and exert a strongly reactionary force in society.
At the end of his theoretical treatment of mass culture, Eco makes what in retrospect is a wryly proleptic comment: “I believe that there can be a novel intended at once as a work of entertainment, a consumer item, and an aesthetically valid work capable of providing original, not kitsch, values.” This double intention fits well The Name of the Rose.
DETECTIVES:
4. The Hounding of Baskerville: Allusion and Apocalypse in Eco’s The Name of the Rose - Michael Cohen
Eco’s allusions to particular detectives, detective writers, and stories in The Name of the Rose are not merely homage or creative borrowing, though they are both these things. What Eco is doing amounts to a novel form of literary history.
5. Eco’s Conflation of Theology and Detection in The Name of the Rose - Joan Del Fattore
A mystery story on two levels, The Name of the Rose presents a series of murders by unknown perpetrators and a series of debates about God, Christ, and the created world.
6. The Detective Novel and the Defense of Humanism – Pierre L. Horn
The name of the Rose, is not only a crime story devoted to the methodical and gradual discovery of the exact circumstances of mysterious events through rational means (though much of our enjoyment comes from its whodunit qualities) but a defense of enlightened humanism as well.
7. Holmes Goes to Carnival: Embarrassing the Signifier in Eco’s AntiDetective Novel – H. Aram Veeser
Critics have generally thought that detective fiction guarantees the triumph of clarity over ambiguity. This essay focuses on the ideological effects stemming from this essential movement toward clarity.
Eco has himself theorized about detective fiction, which, he says, usually bifurcates into “fundamental moves” and “incidental moves.” Eco’s Rose might be taken as an exemplary case of “incidental moves” assuming greater importance than “fundamental” ones. Such a strategy was perhaps to be expected from an author steeped in semiotic theory and known for his deconstructions/literary-critical maneuvers that transmogrify the marginal into the essential and deny fixed oppositions between incidental and fundamental aspects of texts.
SEMIOTICS:
8. Sign and De-Sign: Medieval and Modern Semiotics in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose - Helen T. Bennett
Since antiquity, Western thinkers have consistently been concerned with the relationship between signs and words, on one hand, and the external reality they represent, on the other.
William of Ockham sought to distinguish questions of ontology from questions of terminology. Modern semiotics focuses on the processes of sign production and perception. To formulate their theories, both Ockham and Eco explore, one, how humans perceive and, two, how language affects and records (accurately or inaccurately) the process of perception.
9. Traversing the Labyrinth: The Structures of Discovery in Eco’s the Name of the Rose - Jocelyn Mann
In The Name of the Rose, its reader’s metafictional exploration is a rhizome labyrinth—a mode of conjecture consisting of a semiotic scanning of a novel that can be understood and enjoyed without it but with which the reader who undertakes it, the writer who devises it, and the work itself are enlarged, redefined, and enriched. This is the ironic game of the postmodern novel.
To understand its significance and the role it plays in the universe of the novel and the universe of human culture, a longer look at the characteristics of the rhizome is necessary.
like its evocative title, The Name of the Rose carries a kind of immortality; not in the fixed and everlasting divinity of an absolute Truth but in its revelation of the endless dance of interpretation in Eco’s semiotic world of infinite possibility.
10. Answering Idle Questions: Open and Closed Readers in The Name of the Rose - Deborah Parker
To designate a novel “open” or “closed” in an absolute sense implies that these categories are attributes of the work alone, not indicators of a method of reading or of a reader’s attitude toward a text
In The Name of the Rose the categories of open and closed work on two levels—that of form and that of content—in a way that might be described as paradoxical.
June 6, 2018
Interesting insights into one of my favorite books
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews