Author: Umberto Eco File Type: pdf Umberto Eco published his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980, when he was nearly fifty. In these confessions, the author, now in his late seventies, looks back on his long career as a theorist and his more recent work as a novelist, and explores their fruitful conjunction. He begins by exploring the boundary between fiction and nonfictionplayfully, seriously, brilliantly roaming across this frontier. Good nonfiction, he believes, is crafted like a whodunnit, and a skilled novelist builds precisely detailed worlds through observation and research. Taking us on a tour of his own creative method, Eco recalls how he designed his fictional realms. He began with specific images, made choices of period, location, and voice, composed stories that would appeal to both sophisticated and popular readers. The blending of the real and the fictive extends to the inhabitants of such invented worlds. Why are we moved to tears by a characters plight? In what sense do Anna Karenina, Gregor Samsa, and Leopold Bloom exist? At once a medievalist, philosopher, and scholar of modern literature, Eco astonishes above all when he considers the pleasures of enumeration. He shows that the humble list, the potentially endless series, enables us to glimpse the infinite and approach the ineffable. This young novelist is a master who has wise things to impart about the art of fiction and the power of words. **From Publishers Weekly In this tongue-in-cheek-titled collection of four Richard Ellmann Lectures he gave at Harvard, semiologist, medievalist, and bestselling novelist Eco (The Name of the Rose)hardly young anymore, as he and we knowconfronts the question of what, exactly, creative writing is. (Why is a bad poet a creative writer, while a good scientific essayist is not?) To answer the question, Eco examines the slippery relationship between author, text, and their interpreters. How does the authors intent come to engage the reader? Can the text in itself produce its own Model Reader? How might we best identify the qualities that make readers believe fictional characters really exist?, The final third of the book is devoted to a favored Ecoian pastime enumeration, with the last stop being infinity. An eclectic list of writers who themselves use lists as a literary device joins in the fun Rabelais and Joyce Homer Whitman Alfred Doblin and the confessing young novelist himself in a shameless package of self-referencing and promotion. Always clever and thoughtful, these musings will delight devotees and enlighten newcomers alike. (Apr.) (c) PWxyz, LLC. Review This book is a complex little gem light and entertaining reading with an underlying thrust that is serious and sparkling with insights. Eco promises delight and instruction and delivers both. (Wlad Godzich, University of California, Santa Cruz) Always clever and thoughtful, these musings will delight devotees and enlighten newcomers alike. (Publishers Weekly 2011-01-10) Eco addresses interesting questions what is the boundary between fiction and nonfiction? How do novelists put together books? Why do we care about wholly fictional characters like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary?...As always, Eco is diverting to read. Recommended as a valuable introduction to how an important writer produces his fiction. (David Keymer Library Journal 2011-02-01) Refined by a lifetime of reading, studying, and creating texts across languages, genres, and centuries, the wisdom of this young novelist abounds. (Brendan Driscoll Booklist 2011-03-15) Confessions of a Young Novelist offers a brief glimpse into the mind and process of one of the most important writers of the last 30 years...Eco is a jocular and insightful writer (and speaker), and his ability to present the complex as if it were comprehensible makes Confessions of a Young Novelist a pleasant, albeit brief, read...Its rare to be invited into a great writers intimate space, an opportunity that shouldnt be taken for granted. (Michael Patrick Brady PopMatters 2011-04-15) Is there anything Umberto Eco cannot do? It has been said before and certainly will be said again--Umberto Eco is a true Renaissance man...Now, with the publication of Confessions of a Young Novelist, he offers readers an effective primer on both his oeuvre and the contemporary field of semiotics...Akin to a Paris Review interview turned essay, Confessions is both polemic and intensely personal, infused with Ecos trademark fastidiousness and also bursting with bombasticity. No matter the subject, Eco appears both grandiose and also dedicated to the minutiae. For a public figure and academic, he is delightfully unguarded and frank...The fruits of Ecos semiotic detective work...are presented so clearly as to become Confessionss most fascinating revelations...He posits in his very first paragraph that he is indeed a young novelist. We know this to be untrue, Eco is currently nearing eighty. But this, his first confession, that despite all his fame and honorifics he feels like an amateur, is what imbues all the pages beyond with such vibrancy and hunger--Eco is just another reader, trying to understand. (Hillary Kelly The Millions 2011-05-04) Engaging, brilliant...[A] playful book. (Janet Todd The Guardian 2011-03-12) [Eco] offers a charming glimpse into the demiurges private workshop. (Adam Kirsch Barnes and Noble Review 2011-05-31) Umberto Eco wrote his first novel, The Name of the Rose, in 1980. It was the first of only five novels, and it was a runaway bestseller. The Name of the Rose was so popular that critics accused Eco, a semiotics professor, of programming a computer with a secret formula for a successful novel. Eco was, of course, offended and fired back a series of sarcastic modest proposals that pretty much flattened his critics. There may not be a formula, or a recipe, but there are ingredients for a successful novel, and now, decades later, Eco has decided to tell us what he believes they are. (Susan Salter Reynolds Los Angeles Times 2011-06-02) For good book chat its hard to beat Umberto Eco. The mega-selling Italian novelist, essayist, semiologist, scholar and critic has long been one of our best informed and entertaining commentators on literary matters, and in [this] new book he proves hes still near the top of his game. (Alex Good Toronto Star 2011-07-30) After a lapse of 30 years since his venture into fiction, [Eco] has come up with a meandering little book that offers his readers an effective primer on both his oeuvre and the contemporary field of semiotics...Laced with Ecos fastidiousness but delightfully unguarded and frank, Confessions is divided into four parts with the idea of providing a peek into the elusive process of a writer or what could be described as literary theory. (Business Standard 2011-09-24)

Author: Susan Buck-Morss File Type: pdf The dream of the twentieth century was the construction of mass utopia. As the century closes, this dream is being left behind the belief that industrial modernization can bring about the good society by overcoming material scarcity for all has been challenged by the disintegration of European socialism, capitalist restructuring, and ecological constraints. The larger social vision has given way to private dreams of material happiness and to political cynicism.Developing the notion of dreamworld as both a poetic description of a collective mental state and an analytical concept, Susan Buck-Morss attempts to come to terms with mass dreamworlds at the moment of their passing. She shows how dreamworlds became dangerous when their energy was used by the structures of power as an instrument of force against the masses. Stressing the similarities between the East and West and using the end of the Cold War as her point of departure, she examines both extremes of mass utopia, dreamworld and catastrophe.The book is in four parts. Dreamworlds of Democracy asks whether collective sovereignty can ever be democratic. Dreamworlds of History calls for a rethinking of revolution by political and artistic avant-gardes. Dreamworlds of Mass Culture explores the affinities between mass cultures socialist and capitalist forms. An Afterward places the book in the historical context of the authors collaboration with a group of Moscow philosophers and artists over the past two tumultuous decades. The book is an experiment in visual culture, using images as philosophy, presenting, literally, a way of seeing the past. Its pictorial narratives rescue historical data that with the end of the Cold War are threatened with oblivion and challenge common conceptions of what this century was all about.From Kirkus ReviewsBuck-Morss (The Dialectics of Seeing, 1989) turns her Benjaminian eye on the often surprising convergence of the Western and Soviet utopian imaginaries, to dazzling effect. Reading this book is like receiving a fascinating annotated scrapbook from your really smart friend in Moscow. From 1988 to 1993, Buck-Morss was a visiting scholar there, at what was first called the Institute of Philosophy of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The fact that, by the end of her tenure, it was known as the Russian Academy of Sciences attests to the ideological turbulence of those years and to the dynamism and relevance of her task. Buck-Morsss previous book was a daring attempt to reverse-engineer Walter Benjamins Paris Arcades Project out of the more than one thousand fragments left behind at his death. If Benjamins project was, as he put it, codeconcerned with awakening from the nineteenth century, Buck-Morsss current undertaking is a none-too-gentle attempt to shake us out of the nightmare that has been our 20th. The scope of her research, often breathtaking, more than justifies a certain measure of methodological madness with an irreverent collagist sensibility worthy of the high modernism at issue here, she nimbly leaps from a blackly hilarious and terrifying chronology of the policy decisions surrounding Lenins embalming, to a mini-history of the figure of the square in avant-garde art on both sides of the Cold War, to a visual pun that compares the architectural sketch for a never-builtcodePalace of the Supreme Soviets, topped by a monumental Lenin statue, with a film still of King Kong atop the Empire State Building. Theres even an early-1990s attempt at ``hypertext scholarly footnotes that threaten to overtake the page. This experiment, however, works less well than those parts of the book that devote themselves to a clear-eyed reading of the visual detritus of mass culture. An ambitious book with the courage to take on the images that complacent post-capitalism might prefer to forget, and the erudition to read them with rigor and wit. -- 2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. About the AuthorSusan Buck-Morss is Professor of Political Philosophy and Social Theory, Department of Government, and Professor of Visual Culture, Department of Art History, Cornell University.

Author: Noah Salomon File Type: pdf For some, the idea of an Islamic state serves to fulfill aspirations for cultural sovereignty and new forms of ethical political practice. For others, it violates the proper domains of both religion and politics. Yet, while there has been much discussion of the idea and ideals of the Islamic state, its possibilities and impossibilities, surprisingly little has been written about how this political formation is lived. For Love of the Prophet looks at the Republic of Sudans twenty-five-year experiment with Islamic statehood. Focusing not on state institutions, but rather on the daily life that goes on in their shadows, Noah Salomons careful ethnography examines the lasting effects of state Islamization on Sudanese society through a study of the individuals and organizations working in its midst. Salomon investigates Sudan at a crucial moment in its history--balanced between unity and partition, secular and religious politics, peace and war--when those who desired an Islamic state were rethinking the political form under which they had lived for nearly a generation. Countering the dominant discourse, Salomon depicts contemporary Islamic politics not as a response to secularism and Westernization but as a node in a much longer conversation within Islamic thought, augmented and reappropriated as state projects of Islamic reform became objects of debate and controversy. Among the first books to delve into the making of the modern Islamic state, For Love of the Prophet reveals both novel political ideals and new articulations of Islam as it is rethought through the lens of the nation. **

Author: Yücel Güçlü File Type: pdf The purpose of the book is twofold first, to give an accurate and reasonably complete narrative account of the Armenian events of 1909 and their aftermath in the province of Adana and the developments leading up to and following them and equally importantly, to provide an interpretive framework that makes some sense out of this episode in Ottoman history. The book opens with an exposition of the geographical and economic importance of the province of Adana and its vicinity in the Ottoman Empire. This is followed by a broad demographical overview of the region. The position of the Armenians in Adana at the turn of the twentieth century, their linguistical and educational characteristics, their role in the economic and social life, and their schooling effort in the province are all examined. Further, the major causes of the outbreak in the area in 1908-1909, the dimensions of the disorders in April 1909, and the responsibility for the outrages are explored along with the reestablishing of order in the district in May-August 1909. A description and an analysis of Cemal Pasas work of humanitarian relief and reconstruction when he was provincial governor in Adana and a survey of post-1911 Adana and Cemal Pasas governorship at Baghdad are also included in this study. **