Wow! eBook
Misreadings: Penetrating Satirical Essays on Mass Culture and the Elitist Avant-Garde
Author(s): Umberto Eco (Author), William Weaver (Translator)
- Publisher: Harvest / Harcourt Brace
- Publication Date: May 7, 1993
- Edition: First Edition
- Language: English
- Print length: 180 pages
- ISBN-10: 0156607522
- ISBN-13: 9780156607520
Book Description
Satirical essays in which Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, the overacademic, and the overintellectual and makes penetrating comments about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde. “A scintillating collection of writings” (Los Angeles Times). Translated by William Weaver. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
Categorized as essays, these 15 pastiches by Eco ( Foucault's Pendulum , LJ 9/1/89) were written between 1959 and 1972 and were meant to be amusing. Most appeared first in the Italian vanguard literary magazine Il Verri , and many were collected in a separate volume in 1963. Parody, Eco notes in the introduction, is linked to the topical, i.e., we can relate directly to Sophocles but need footnotes to find our way in Aristophanes (whom we may not find funny). Eco's proviso may account for some of the sophomoric and strained elements in these pastiches. Weaver, the doyen of U.S. translators of Italian, is always astute in finding appropriate cultural substitutions or inserting discreet footnotes. What he lacked license to do was remove the complacent sexism, ageism, and machismo that mark these texts as late Sixties insensitivity. The only successful pastiche is "Regretfully We Are Returning Your... ," in which a publisher's reader rejects the Bible, Homer, Dante, Joyce....
- Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Umberto Eco (1932–2016) was the author of numerous essay collections and seven novels, including The Name of the Rose, The Prague Cemetery, and Inventing the Enemy. He received Italy’s highest literary award, the Premio Strega; was named a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur by the French government; and was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
