Download or read book Umberto Eco The Da Vinci Code and the Intellectual in the Age of Popular Culture written by Douglass Merrell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Outsider Theory written by Jonathan Eburne and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2018-09-18 with total page 555 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vital and timely reminder that modern life owes as much to outlandish thinking as to dominant ideologies What do the Nag Hammadi library, Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, speculative feminist historiography, Marcus Garvey’s finances, and maps drawn by asylum patients have in common? Jonathan P. Eburne explores this question as never before in Outsider Theory, a timely book about outlandish ideas. Eburne brings readers on an adventure in intellectual history that stresses the urgency of taking seriously—especially in an era of fake news—ideas that might otherwise be discarded or regarded as errant, unfashionable, or even unreasonable. Examining the role of such thinking in contemporary intellectual history, Eburne challenges the categorical demarcation of good ideas from flawed, wild, or bad ones, addressing the surprising extent to which speculative inquiry extends beyond the work of professional intellectuals to include that of nonprofessionals as well, whether amateurs, unfashionable observers, or the clinically insane. Considering the work of a variety of such figures—from popular occult writers and gnostics to so-called outsider artists and pseudoscientists—Eburne argues that an understanding of its circulation and recirculation is indispensable to the history of ideas. He devotes close attention to ideas and texts usually omitted from or marginalized within orthodox histories of literary modernism, critical theory, and continental philosophy, yet which have long garnered the critical attention of specialists in religion, science studies, critical race theory, and the history of the occult. In doing so he not only sheds new light on a fascinating body of creative thought but also proposes new approaches for situating contemporary humanities scholarship within the history of ideas. However important it might be to protect ourselves from “bad” ideas, Outsider Theory shows how crucial it is for us to know how and why such ideas have left their impression on modern-day thinking and continue to shape its evolution.
Download or read book Turning Back the Clock written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time: 2000 to 2005, the years of neoconservatism, terrorism, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ascension of Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Umberto Eco's response is a provocative, passionate, and witty series of essays--which originally appeared in the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and L'Espresso--that leaves no slogan unexamined, no innovation unexposed. What led us into this age of hot wars and media populism, and how was it sold to us as progress? Eco discusses such topics as racism, mythology, the European Union, rhetoric, the Middle East, technology, September 11, medieval Latin, television ads, globalization, Harry Potter, anti-Semitism, logic, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, Italian street demonstrations, fundamentalism, The Da Vinci Code, and magic and magical thinking.The famous author and respected scholar shows his practical, engaged side: an intellectual involved in events both local and global, a man concerned about taste, politics, education, ethics, and where our troubled world is headed.
Download or read book TRANSPOSITIONES 2024 Vol 3 Issue 1 Eco Religiosity written by Joanna Godlewicz-Adamiec and published by V&R unipress. This book was released on 2024-04-15 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a critical ecological approach, the entanglement of nature in the discourses of supernatural religious doctrine and practice is often perceived as one of the causes of the instrumentalization of the natural world for anthropocentric hegemony over divine creation. On the other hand, a certain “environmental turn” can be observed in the theological discourses of various religions. In addition to the eco-theological tendencies present in contemporary theological reflection within the world’s main religions, another interesting phenomenon is the attempt to restore archaic forms of spirituality in the materialistic discourses of posthumanism. These issues are critically analyzed in individual articles taking into account various approaches and thematic circles.
Download or read book Creative Interventions written by Eugenio Bolongaro and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2020-06-12 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who are “intellectuals”? What do they think their role and function in contemporary society is? Are they on the endangered-species list? Is equating conservatism with conservation becoming their dominant survival strategy? This book is a collection of essays that examines some of the changes in the activities, role, function and self-perception of Italian intellectuals since World War II (two major divides are considered to be the crisis of 1956–7 and the fall of the Berlin Wall). The first section examines some of the most influential figures in the early decades, the second the activities of contemporary intellectuals, a third gives voice to some contemporary writers, a fourth contains some comparative essays about the role of intellectuals in influential contemporary Western cultures and a final section is devoted to some cross-disciplinary forays and reflections on the relevance and possible future directions of these inquiries.
Download or read book The Inner World of Doctor Who written by Iain MacRury and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-05-11 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Doctor Who approaches its fiftieth anniversary recent series have taken the show to new heights in terms of popular appeal and critical acclaim.The Doctor and his TARDIS-driven adventures, along with companions and iconic monsters, are now recognised and enjoyed globally. The time is ripe for a detailed analytic assessment of this cultural phenomenon. Focussing on the most recent television output The Inner World of Doctor Who examines why the show continues to fascinate contemporary audiences. Presenting closely-observed psychoanalytic readings of selected episodes, this book examines why these stories of time travel, monsters, and complex human relationships have been successful in providing such an emotionally rich dramatization of human experience. The Inner World of Doctor Who seeks to explore the multiple cultural and emotional dimensions of the series, moving back and forth from behind the famous sofa, where children remember hiding from scary monsters, and onto the proverbial psychoanalytic couch.
Download or read book Foucault s Pendulum written by Umberto Eco and published by Random House. This book was released on 2014-08-29 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three book editors, jaded by reading far too many crackpot manuscripts on the mystic and the occult, are inspired by an extraordinary conspiracy story told to them by a strange colonel to have some fun. They start feeding random bits of information into a powerful computer capable of inventing connections between the entries, thinking they are creating nothing more than an amusing game, but then their game starts to take over, the deaths start mounting, and they are forced into a frantic search for the truth
Download or read book The Dan Brown Craze written by Aiping Zhang and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-05-11 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Chinese translation of The Da Vinci Code was released in China in 2004, the “Dan Brown Craze” has swept across the country. All of Brown’s novels have subsequently been translated into Chinese and sold millions of copies. No living foreign writer has generated so much media coverage and scholarship in China within such a short period of time; not even Toni Morrison or J.K. Rowling. Brown’s rendering of dichotomies, such as science and religion, humanity and divinity, good and evil, and liberty and privacy, resonates well with his Chinese readers because they feel that these issues are no longer irrelevant to them. They see an urgent need for a revision, if not an entire redefinition, of their existing beliefs and values. This book examines the plot, characterization, themes, setting, codes, knowledge, institutions, and techniques in his novels, and delivers a careful textual analysis, a selective dissemination of relevant information on different subjects, and a perceptive comparison between Brown and other Chinese and Western writers. As such, it shows how his thrillers have been appreciated and studied in China, and what kinds of discoveries, challenges, controversies, and insights have surfaced in the Chinese appreciation of Brown’s novels. Furthermore, the book explores why the “Dan Brown Craze” has lasted this long and exerted a broad and far-reaching impact upon the reading, writing, studying, translating, publishing, and marketing of fiction in China.
Download or read book The Search for the Perfect Language written by Umberto Eco and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 1997-04-08 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that there once existed a language which perfectly and unambiguously expressed the essence of all possible things and concepts has occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians, mystics and others for at least two millennia. This is an investigation into the history of that idea and of its profound influence on European thought, culture and history. From the early Dark Ages to the Renaissance it was widely believed that the language spoken in the Garden of Eden was just such a language, and that all current languages were its decadent descendants from the catastrophe of the Fall and at Babel. The recovery of that language would, for theologians, express the nature of divinity, for cabbalists allow access to hidden knowledge and power, and for philosophers reveal the nature of truth. Versions of these ideas remained current in the Enlightenment, and have recently received fresh impetus in attempts to create a natural language for artificial intelligence. The story that Umberto Eco tells ranges widely from the writings of Augustine, Dante, Descartes and Rousseau, arcane treatises on cabbalism and magic, to the history of the study of language and its origins. He demonstrates the initimate relation between language and identity and describes, for example, how and why the Irish, English, Germans and Swedes - one of whom presented God talking in Swedish to Adam, who replied in Danish, while the serpent tempted Eve in French - have variously claimed their language as closest to the original. He also shows how the late eighteenth-century discovery of a proto-language (Indo-European) for the Aryan peoples was perverted to support notions of racial superiority. To this subtle exposition of a history of extraordinary complexity, Umberto Eco links the associated history of the manner in which the sounds of language and concepts have been written and symbolized. Lucidly and wittily written, the book is, in sum, a tour de force of scholarly detection and cultural interpretation, providing a series of original perspectives on two thousand years of European History. The paperback edition of this book is not available through Blackwell outside of North America.
Download or read book Adorno on Popular Culture written by Robert Winston Witkin and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unpacks Adorno's critique of popular culture in an engagingly, looking at the development of theories of authority, commodification and negative dialectics. Goes on to consider Adorno's writing on specific aspects of popular culture.
Download or read book From the Tree to the Labyrinth written by Umberto Eco and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How we create and organize knowledge is the theme of this major achievement by Umberto Eco. Demonstrating once again his inimitable ability to bridge ancient, medieval, and modern modes of thought, he offers here a brilliant illustration of his longstanding argument that problems of interpretation can be solved only in historical context.
Download or read book Universe of the Mind written by Юрий Михайлович Лотман and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Universe of the Mind A Semiotic Theory of Culture Yuri M. Lotman Introduction by Umberto Eco Translated by Ann Shukman A major book by one of the initiators of cultural studies. "Universe of the Mind is an ambitious, complex, and wide-ranging book that semioticians, textual critics, and those interested in cultural studies will find stimulating and immensely suggestive." --Journal of Communication "Soviet semiotics offers a distinctive, richly productive approach to literary and cultural studies and Universe of the Mind represents a summation of the intellectual career of the man who has done most to guarantee this." --Slavic and East European Journal Universe of the Mind addresses three main areas: meaning and text, culture, and history. The result is a full-scale attempt to demonstrate the workings of the semiotic space or intellectual world. Part One is concerned with the ways that texts generate meaning. Part Two addresses Lotman's central idea of the semiosphere--the domain in which all semiotic systems can function--presented through an analogy with the global biosphere. Part Three focuses on semiotics from the point of view of history. A seminal text in cultural semiotics, the book's ambitious scope also makes it applicable to disciplines outside semiotics. The book will be of great interest to those concerned with cultural studies, anthropology, Slavic studies, critical theory, philosophy, and historiography. Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman is the founder of the Moscow-Tartu School and the initiator of the discipline of cultural semiotics.
Download or read book The Pleasures of Metamorphosis written by Lucy Fraser and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2017-06-05 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lucy Fraser’s The Pleasures of Metamorphosis: Japanese and English Fairy Tale Transformations of "The Little Mermaid" explores Japanese and English transformations of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 Danish fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by focusing on pleasure as a means to analyze the huge variety of texts that transform a canonical fairy tale such as Andersen’s. Fraser examines over twenty Japanese and English transformations, including literary texts, illustrated books, films, and television series. This monograph also draws upon criticism in both Japanese and English, meeting a need in Western fairy-tale studies for more culturally diverse perspectives. Fraser provides a model for critical cross-cultural fairy tale analysis in her examination of the journey of a single fairy tale across two languages. The book begins with the various approaches to reading and writing fairy tales, with a history of "The Little Mermaid" in Japanese and English culture. Disney’s The Little Mermaid and Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea are discussed as examples that simulate pleasurable physical experiences through animation’s tools of music and voice, and visual effects of movement and metamorphosis. Fraser then explores the literary effects of the fairy tale by male authors, such as Oscar Wilde, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, and Abe Kobo, who invoke familiar fairy-tale conventions and delineate some of the pleasures of what can be painful enchantment with a mermaid or with the fairy tale itself. The author examines the portrayals of the mermaid in three short stories by Matsumoto Yuko, Kurahashi Yumiko, and Ogawa Yoko, engaging with familiar fairy tales, reference to fairy-tale research, and reflections on the immersive experience of reading. Women characters and authors are also hyperaware of the possible meanings of Andersen’s "The Little Mermaid" and of the fairy tale itself, furthering the discussion with Nonaka Hiiragi’s novel Ningyo-hime no kutsu, and D[di?]’s novel Sento no ningyo-hime to majo no mori, as well as an episode of the science fiction television series Dark Angel. Fraser concludes that the "pleasure" framework is useful for a cross-cultural study of creative engagements with and transformations of a particular fairy tale. Few studies have examined Japanese fairy-tale transformations to the extent that Fraser has, presenting fascinating information that will intrigue fairy-tale scholars and those wanting to learn more about the representation of pleasure behind the imaginative and fantastical.
Download or read book The Rule of Four written by Ian Caldwell and published by Dial Press. This book was released on 2004-05-11 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “One part The Da Vinci Code, one part The Name of the Rose and one part A Separate Peace . . . a smart, swift, multitextured tale that both entertains and informs.”—San Francisco Chronicle NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Princeton. Good Friday, 1999. On the eve of graduation, two friends are a hairsbreadth from solving the mysteries of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a Renaissance text that has baffled scholars for centuries. Famous for its hypnotic power over those who study it, the five-hundred-year-old Hypnerotomachia may finally reveal its secrets—to Tom Sullivan, whose father was obsessed with the book, and Paul Harris, whose future depends on it. As the deadline looms, research has stalled—until a vital clue is unearthed: a long-lost diary that may prove to be the key to deciphering the ancient text. But when a longtime student of the book is murdered just hours later, a chilling cycle of deaths and revelations begins—one that will force Tom and Paul into a fiery drama, spun from a book whose power and meaning have long been misunderstood. BONUS: This edition includes an excerpt from Dustin Thomason's 12.21. “Profoundly erudite . . . the ultimate puzzle-book.”—The New York Times Book Review
Download or read book The Role of the Reader written by Umberto Eco and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the differences between "open" and "closed" texts, or, texts that actively involve the reader and texts that evoke a limited, predetermined response from the reader. -- Back cover.
Download or read book I Am Pilgrim written by Terry Hayes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-07-21 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a seedy hotel near Ground Zero, a woman lies face down in a pool of acid, features melted of her face, teeth missing, fingerprints gone. The room has been sprayed down with DNA-eradicating antiseptic spray. Pilgrim, the code name for a legendary, world-class segret agent, quickly realizes that all of the murderer's techniques were pulled directly from his own book, a cult classic of forensic science written under a pen name.
Download or read book History of Beauty written by Umberto Eco and published by Rizzoli International Publications. This book was released on 2004 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the nature, the meaning, and the very history of the idea of beauty in Western culture; illustrated with abundant examples of painting and sculpture and lengthy quotations from writers and philosophers. Demonstrates how every historical era has had its own ideas about eye-appeal.
