The Open Work
Umberto Eco
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0674639766
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
More than twenty years after its original appearance in Italian, The Open Work remains significant for its powerful concept of "openness"--the artist's decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Umberto Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.
This entirely new edition, edited for the English-language audience with the approval of Eco himself, includes an authoritative introduction by David Robey that explores Eco's thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco's mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art. Harvard University Press will publish separately and simultaneously the extended study of James Joyce that was originally part of The Open Work, entitled The Aesthetics of Chaosmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce. The Open Work explores a set of issues in aesthetics that remain central to critical theory, and does so in a characteristically vivid style. Eco's convincing manner of presenting ideas and his instinct for the lively example are threaded compellingly throughout. This book is at once a major treatise in modern aesthetics and an excellent introduction to Eco's thought.
process, and to acknowledge the presence of permanent mental structures by virtue of which "the physical world reveals the organization that transcends it by abandoning itself to our perception."" t The original locus, or place of origin, is where Being, masked, reveals Itself in structural events while avoiding all structure. Structure (stable and objective) and process (qua creation of continuously new structures) explode—as should already have happened in Levi-Strauss—and what is left is no
The referential diversity of the proposition (and, therefore, of its conceptual value) resides not in the proposition itself but in the addressee. And yet the capacity to vary is not totally extraneous to the proposition itself. Uttered by a railroad employee sitting at an information desk, this sentence will be quite different from an identical sentence uttered by someone who is trying to draw our attention to a particular character; indeed, they are two different sentences. The second speaker
assumptions. Our world of acquired forms must maintain its organic structure in the sense that it must evolve harmoniously, without shocks and undue deformations; but evolve it must, and in order to evolve it must undergo certain modifications. After all, what most distinguishes Western man from those who live in "primitive" societies is precisely the dynamic, progressive nature of his cultural patterns. What makes a society "primitive" is its inability to let its cultural patterns evolve, its
Sartre, who could not understand how writers who seemed to keep such a distance from political issues in their narrative could be so eager to be personally involved in them. But, as a matter of fact, all these writers (some more, some less) felt that the only way they could deal with their world in their work was by "playing" with narrative structures, since all the problems which, at the level of individual psychology and of biography, could be considered problems of conscience, in literature
has a "structural" value (and here I am using the term "structure" as a synonym for "form," for an artistic entity), since it shares in the perfection and legitimacy of the form that it supports. What finally unifies all these theoretical formulations is the fundamental premise according to which a form, once it has reached completion and autonomy, can be seen as perfect only if it is dynamically considered. Aesthetic contemplation is this active consideration that retraces the process which gave