Eco's middle Ages and the historical novel

Coletti, Theresa

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511627033.006

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“…He speaks of:distant worlds, as in the case of The Name of the Rose , The Island of the Day Before , and Baudolino , or through more contemporary settings and characters preoccupied with the past and memory, as in Foucault's Pendulum and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana . (Coletti, 2009: 71)Eco reproposes historical novels through a postmodern approach and brings together the events and ideas of the past with matters of our times. In fact, his readers get used to looking for associations and analogies between past and present (Capozzi, 2006: 465, 479).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Extremes of ‘narrative by proxy’: ‘Memory’ in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery and ‘Oblivion’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words and Whereabouts

Kashani

2022

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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This research is a comparative study of narrative strategies by Umberto Eco (1932–2016) and Jhumpa Lahiri (1967–) as the most extreme and diverse examples of the ‘narrative by proxy.’ Eco, in his narrative and critical writings, insists on ‘memory,’ on the act of remembering the past in order to build an identity and a future, while Lahiri with her novels in Italian puts emphasis on ‘oblivion’ and forgetfulness as the key to liberation from the conflict of languages and cultures. In the novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Eco builds an encyclopedic and paper memory of 20th-century Italy by means of memorabilia such as images, journals, novels, and comics. In the novel The Prague Cemetery, he uses not only a double narrator and the exchange between the model author and the narrator to render the narrator's identity ambiguous but also the false document on the Jewish conspiracy, which caused hatred against the Jews and changed the course of history. Lahiri, on the other hand, follows the style of Gertrude Stein, which is impersonal autobiography. In the novel In Other Words, she constructs a linguistic autobiography and in Whereabouts an impersonal one, by avoiding to name and identify the characters and places. Thus, this article is an attempt to demonstrate how the opposite concepts of ‘memory’ and ‘oblivion,’ in Eco's historical and at the same time anti-historical strategies and Lahiri's transnational and anti-conventional ones, can contribute to the development of the narrative by proxy.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…distant worlds, as in the case of The Name of the Rose , The Island of the Day Before , and Baudolino , or through more contemporary settings and characters preoccupied with the past and memory, as in Foucault's Pendulum and The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana . (Coletti, 2009: 71)…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Extremes of ‘narrative by proxy’: ‘Memory’ in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery and ‘Oblivion’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words and Whereabouts

Kashani

2022

Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies

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“…In the course of his enquiry, he discovers that the identity of the killer is closely dependent on discovering the secret of the library, which is supervised and directed by a blind librarian who hides the route to the library. The novel is called a historical novel (Theresa Coletti, 2009) and a detective story (Peter Bondanella, 2009); Capozzi lists a series of titles «metaphysical, mystery, detective or anti-detective story, post-modern, historiographic metafiction; historical, gothic or essay novel; bildungsroman» considering it difficult to label (1989: 412).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Intertextuality: Eastern Themes

Abdollahi

2020

SCRIPTA

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Faith in fakes: Secrets, lies, and conspiracies in Umberto Eco’s writings

Rodríguez-Ferrándiz

2019

Semiotica

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This paper offers a re-reading of the works of Umberto Eco, be they academic, journalistic or literary, with a pseudologic tone: his desire to investigate the mechanisms of lying, and their relation with fiction, falsification, error, secrecy, and conspiracy. The study will review some of his main academic texts in the fields of semiotics, rhetoric, and aesthetics, and will make some references to his recent novels and essay compilations, as well as offer an explanation of how the evolution of his thoughts takes a pessimistic turn. The face of the lie, which initially was aesthetic consolation and consumerist delusion, and then a game of intelligence, a creative stimulus and an interpretive challenge, changes when serves the purpose of extortion, manipulation, and war. In short, it could be argued that Eco became increasingly disappointed by deceptions, and lost faith in fakes and forgeries.

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Eco's middle Ages and the historical novel

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Extremes of ‘narrative by proxy’: ‘Memory’ in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery and ‘Oblivion’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words and Whereabouts

Extremes of ‘narrative by proxy’: ‘Memory’ in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and The Prague Cemetery and ‘Oblivion’ in Jhumpa Lahiri’s In Other Words and Whereabouts

Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Intertextuality: Eastern Themes

Faith in fakes: Secrets, lies, and conspiracies in Umberto Eco’s writings

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