{"product_id":"six-walks-in-the-fictional-woods","title":"Six Walks in the Fictional Woods","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eOne of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eUmberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Name of the Rose\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ewhen 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eSix Walks in the Fictional Woods,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ea 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhether he is dissecting grammatical ambiguities in Gérard de Nerval's nineteenth-century romantic masterpiece\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eSylvie,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003estudying the rhythms of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels, or tracing the web of fraud and misattribution that produced the antisemitic conspiracy theory of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Protocols of the Elders of Zion,\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003ethis is Eco at his very best: intellectually omnivorous, endlessly fascinated by hoaxes, and always an adept navigator of the narrative forests that surround us.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Wiley","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":53350105645370,"sku":"9780674302464","price":42.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0868\/6449\/4906\/files\/9780674302464.jpg?v=1776831451","url":"https:\/\/titlemusicfilmbooks.com\/products\/six-walks-in-the-fictional-woods","provider":"TITLE ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}