{"product_id":"six-walks-in-the-fictional-woods-9780674302464","title":"Six Walks in the Fictional Woods","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eThe Atlantic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cb\u003eOne of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eUmberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel \u003ci\u003eThe Name of the Rose\u003c\/i\u003e when he was forty-eight years old, yet he believed that everything he had written to that point--from treatises on semiotics to essays on mass culture--took the form of a story. To Eco, scholarship, much like fiction, was shaped by narrative. It was the stuff of life itself. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eSix Walks in the Fictional Woods, \u003c\/i\u003e a collection of essays based on Eco's 1992-1993 Norton Lectures at Harvard, illuminates fiction's porous boundaries--in particular, the myriad ways that literary works conscript readers' experiences and expectations. Fiction, says Eco, can offer metaphysical comfort by appealing to our desire for a smaller, more legible world, one that gives a definitive answer to the question of \"whodunnit?\" But it also makes demands of us, presupposing a model reader who possesses the cultural knowledge necessary to interpret the text, as well as a willingness to follow the never-quite-specified rules of the literary game. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eWhether he is dissecting grammatical ambiguities in Gérard de Nerval's nineteenth-century romantic masterpiece \u003ci\u003eSylvie, \u003c\/i\u003e studying the rhythms of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, or tracing the web of fraud and misattribution that produced the antisemitic conspiracy theory of \u003ci\u003eThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion, \u003c\/i\u003e this is Eco at his very best: intellectually omnivorous, endlessly fascinated by hoaxes, and always an adept navigator of the narrative forests that surround us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eEco, Umberto:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Umberto Eco (1932-2016) was an acclaimed writer, philosopher, medievalist, and semiotician. In addition to dozens of nonfiction books, he authored seven novels, including \u003ci\u003eThe Name of the Rose, \u003c\/i\u003e which has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold more than fifty million copies worldwide.\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMenand, Louis:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Louis Menand is a historian, essayist, and the author of several books, including \u003ci\u003eThe Metaphysical Club, \u003c\/i\u003e which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for history, and \u003ci\u003eThe Free World, \u003c\/i\u003e which was named one of the best books of 2021 by the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times.\u003c\/i\u003e A staff writer at the \u003ci\u003eNew Yorker, \u003c\/i\u003e he is Lee Simpkins Family Professor of Arts and Sciences and Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English at Harvard University.","brand":"Belknap Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51603257524498,"sku":"9780674302464","price":16.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_6b7836e6-53da-40d1-8cb4-7501b48010ef.jpg?v=1757432016","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/six-walks-in-the-fictional-woods-9780674302464","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}