Michael Caesar

Umberto Eco: Philosophy, Semiotics and the Work of Fiction

Acknowledgements. Note on References. Introduction. 1. Form, Interpretation and the Open Work. 2. A Critical View of Culture: Mass Communications, Politics and the Avant--garde. 3. Introducing the Study of Signs. 4. A Study of Semiotics. 5. Semiotics Bounded and Unbound. 6. Theory and Fiction. 7. Secrets, Paranoia and Critical Reading. 8. Kant, the Platypus and the Horizon. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index.

Franco Moretti and the World Literature Debate

1.1. The title of Franco Moretti’s most recent book, Graphs, Maps, Trees,1 headlines three ‘abstract models’ with which he sets about the formal analysis of the novel world-wide, based respectively in quantitative history, geography, and evolutionary theory. The volume is a synthesis of the sustained theoretical inquiry into literary form that Moretti has been conducting over the past six or seven years (but whose roots, as we shall see, lie in much earlier work) and which has given rise to lively debate, particularly in the pages of New Left Review as well as on the web.2 It is an invitation to reflect on the contribution of a writer who has interesting and important things to say about the practice of literary history in general and the development of the novel in particular.3