Six Walks in the Fictional Woods: (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

"Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous." -The Atlantic One of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction. Umberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel The Name of the Rose when he was forty-eight years old, yet he believed that everything he had written to that point-from treatises on semiotics to essays on mass culture-took the form of a story. To Eco, scholarship, much like fiction, was shaped by narrative. It was the stuff of life itself. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, a collection of essays based on Eco's 1992-1993 Norton Lectures at Harvard, illuminates fiction's porous boundaries-in particular, the myriad ways that literary works conscript readers' experiences and expectations. Fiction, says Eco, can offer metaphysical comfort by appealing to our desire for a smaller, more legible world, one that gives a definitive answer to the question of "whodunnit?" But it also makes demands of us, presupposing a model reader who possesses the cultural knowledge necessary to interpret the text, as well as a willingness to follow the never-quite-specified rules of the literary game. Whether he is dissecting grammatical ambiguities in Gérard de Nerval's nineteenth-century romantic masterpiece Sylvie, studying the rhythms of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, or tracing the web of fraud and misattribution that produced the antisemitic conspiracy theory of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, this is Eco at his very best: intellectually omnivorous, endlessly fascinated by hoaxes, and always an adept navigator of the narrative forests that surround us.

About the Author :
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was an acclaimed writer, philosopher, medievalist, and semiotician. In addition to dozens of nonfiction books, he authored seven novels, including The Name of the Rose, which has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold more than fifty million copies worldwide. Louis Menand is a historian, essayist, and the author of several books, including The Metaphysical Club, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history, and The Free World, which was named one of the best books of 2021 by the New York Times. A staff writer at the New Yorker, he is Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University.

Review :
Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous...The literary examples Eco employs range from Dante to Dumas, from Sterne to Spillane. His text is thought-provoking, often outright funny, and full of surprising juxtapositions. Reading [these chapters] is indeed like wandering in the woods...They might in fact be called, more prosaically, ‘How to Be a Good Reader,’ for Eco, in his incredibly manipulative way, has you eating out of his hand by the end of them. The dim boundary between the imaginary and the real is Eco's home terrain...He is a foxy gamesman, using enchanted woods as a flexible image for narrative texts, and mustering a playful array of allusions from The Three Musketeers to the Rocky Horror Picture Show. [This] dashing and stylish series of six lectures...displays Umberto Eco's enviable ability to transform arid semiotics and narrative theory into intellectual entertainment. Eco’s wood is a vaster, foggier place than the simple Eden that sheltered the meaningful, manageable texts and ideas that were traditional canon until very recent times...[He] is among the wisest of the modern literary wise guys. Eco does ingenious work...with the temporal intricacies of [Gérard de Nerval’s Sylvie], starting with the tense of the verbs in its first sentence and opening out into elaborate formalist analyses of flashback.