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Peter Bondanella. Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture. New York. Cambridge University Press. 1997. xvi + 218 pages. $44.95/30. ISBN 0-52144200-1.
Umberto Eco, one of Italy's most important intellectuals during the last two decades, especially following his unprecedented international success as a fiction writer, has captured the attention of many readers from around the world. English-speaking students and scholars of Eco have long awaited a monographic study that provides an overall and well-documented picture of the wellknown professor of semiotics, novelist, literary theorist, and expert in mass culture and communication. Peter Bondanella's Umberto Eco and the Open Text, an extremely intelligent, well-researched monograph and the most lucid study on Umberto Eco to date, was certainly well worth the wait.
Written in a style and language that make for easy and pleasurable reading, Bondanella's text takes us through eight chapters filled with information and acute observations on practically every major aspect of Eco's outstanding career as semiotician and novelist. From the opening chapter to the last, we are reminded that we are dealing with a most unusual author who is constantly revising his writings...