On the Shoulders of Giants
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A posthumous collection of essays by one of our greatest contemporary thinkers that provides a towering vision of Western culture.
In Umberto Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose, Nicholas of Morimondo laments, “We no longer have the learning of the ancients, the age of giants is past!” To which the protagonist, William of Baskerville, replies: “We are dwarfs, but dwarfs who stand on the shoulders of those giants, and small though we are, we sometimes manage to see farther on the horizon than they.”
On the Shoulders of Giants is a collection of essays based on lectures Eco famously delivered at the Milanesiana Festival in Milan over the last fifteen years of his life. Previously unpublished, the essays explore themes he returned to again and again in his writing: the roots of Western culture and the origin of language, the nature of beauty and ugliness, the potency of conspiracies, the lure of mysteries, and the imperfections of art. Eco examines the dynamics of creativity and considers how every act of innovation occurs in conversation with a superior ancestor.
In these playful, witty, and breathtakingly erudite essays, we encounter an intellectual who reads comic strips, reflects on Heraclitus, Dante, and Rimbaud, listens to Carla Bruni, and watches Casablanca while thinking about Proust. On the Shoulders of Giants reveals both the humor and the colossal knowledge of a contemporary giant.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This delightful collection assembles 12 essays by the late Italian novelist originating in lectures he delivered between 2001 and 2015 at the annual La Milanesiana cultural festival. Eco's remarks on such broad topics as "Beauty" and "Ugliness," "Some Revelations on Secrecy," and "Representations of the Sacred" reveal his astonishingly wide range of interests, encompassing such varied subjects as linguistics and chemistry. At times, his erudition might lose some American readers how many will be familiar with the po tes galants movement, or the literary character Jacopo Ortis? But his skill in making unexpected connections as when he applies T.S. Eliot's critique of Hamlet as a "poorly made patchwork of previous... material" to explain why Casablanca's "hundred clich s" resulted in a much-loved film whose viewers can "quote the classic lines even before the actors do" and, especially, his wit will win his audience's attention back. Of Thomas Aquinas, for example, Eco notes that since the great medieval philosopher believed that resurrected bodies in the afterlife would retain their hair, but not genitals, "This would suggest that in heaven you can get a shampoo and set, but you cannot have sex." If Eco often leads readers down a not easily followed intellectual path, they are usually well rewarded for persisting on it.
