Apocalypse Postponed: Essays by Umberto Eco (Perspectives) - Softcover

Eco, Umberto

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253024196 ISBN 13: 9780253024190

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2000

Synopsis

An erudite and witty collection of Umberto Eco's essays on mass culture from the 1960s through the 1980s, including major pieces which have not been translated into English before. The discussion is framed by opposing characterizations of current intellectuals as apocalyptic and opposed to all mass culture, or as integrated intellectuals, so much a part of mass culture as to be unaware of serving it. Organized in four main parts, "Mass Culture: Apocalypse Postponed," "Mass Media and the Limits of Communication," "The Rise and Fall of Counter-Cultures," and "In Search of Italian Genius," Eco looks at a variety of topics and cultural productions, including the world of Charlie Brown, distinctions between highbrow and lowbrow, the future of literacy, Chinese comic strips, whether countercultures exist, Fellini's Ginger and Fred, and the Italian genius industry.

About this title

About the Author:

Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an Italian novelist, medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, and literary critic. He is the author of several bestselling novels, including The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Teacher (Semiotics/Univ. of Bologna), editor, cultural commentator, and novelist (Foucault's Pendulum, 1989), Eco offers refreshing commentary on cultural life, primarily in Italy, from the mid-1960s to the late '80s, when intellectuals were especially alarmed by the emergence of a mass or pop culture. Dedicating his book to those he calls the ``apocalyptics,'' cultural elites who fear the destruction of their world by mass communication and popular entertainment, he offers historical surveys of key terms such as ``culture,'' ``intellectual,'' and ``design,'' bringing to these terms more inclusive definitions that embrace comic books, TV, popular music, and a whole range of experience that he includes in the idea of civilization. He recalls introducing his collection of Superman comics at a distinguished European conference of theologians and philosophers discussing mythography; republishes his famous essay from the New York Review of Books on ``Peanuts'' (the ``microcosm,'' the ``primitive epic'') for ``humanists who do not read comic strips''; and to prove that ``the medium is not always the message,'' he analyzes the official comic strips of the Chinese communist government. In lucid, persuasive, and artfully illustrated essays, Eco expands the range of what is acceptable as culture: television programs, computers, popular music, posters, the whole counterculture, anything that does not require paper made from trees, for, he concludes in a typically gnomic remark, ``every new book reduces the quantity of oxygen.'' Although Eco occasionally sounds foreign and anachronistic, he displays a universal sympathy and a comprehensive eye that ranges from Snoopy, who has ``no hope of promotion,'' to the ``Genius Industry''--those poor eccentrics who believe themselves to be victims of their own originality, publishing and reviewing their own books. Eco is a true original--substantial, lucid, humane, and a great deal of fun. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0253024196
• ISBN 13: 9780253024190
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240