The Limits of Interpretation

E-009: Indiana University Press. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1990. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN. 1990. 295 pgs. Illustrated with diagrams. Signed by Umberto Eco on the title page. First Edition/First printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in half-cloth with gilt titles present to the spine. Boards have light wear present to the extremities of the boards. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. In this new collection of essays, Eco focuses on what he calls the limits of interpretation, or, as he once noted in another context, ""the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation"". Readers of Eco's other work will find here all the ingredients with which they have become familiar--vast learning, an agile and exciting mind, good humor and a brilliance of insight. Primarily for specialists, this book by the best-selling author of In the Name of the Rose (who practiced semiotics long before fiction) is also largely theoretical, even though bolstered by illustrations and demonstrations that focus on aspects of Joyce, Pirandello, Borges, and Pliny the Younger. The theoretical portions discuss the theories of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Augustine as well as modern thinkers such as Derrida; this unusual blend of references, along with a playfully academic humor, is characteristic of Eco. He argues that, while there may be no rules for determining which interpretations of a text are best, there are rules for determining which are bad. These 15 essays, written mostly in the past five years, deal with fakes and forgeries, serials, dramas, animals, and some fairly abstruse semiotic topics. They are all profitably accessible to the sophisticated general reader, though Eco's penchant for analyzing things into "subsystems and subsystems of subsystems" can lead to long, drawn out passages. E-009; 9.5 X 6.4 X 1.3 inches; 295 pages .