Twelve Walks in the Fictional Woods: A One-Day Symposium on the Fiction and Ideas of Umberto Eco
Friday, 5 October 2001
Senate Chamber, Brock University
"Taken literally, these texts were a pile of absurdities, riddles, contradictions."
Umberto Eco has long engaged his fiction and short narratives as atelier, as a vital and vibrant workshop through which to explore and popularize his ideas, from his semiotics and theories of (mis)reader response to his aesthetics, from his musings on the end of time and his confidences in the future of the book to his more recent celebrations of the serendipitous interweavings of language and lunacy. The twelve 20-minute "walks" that will comprise this one-day symposium will venture into the woods of Ecos ideas via the path of one of his fictions -- fiction as atelier, narrative as design studio. Ideas that might be explored include but are no means limited to discussions of Ecos fiction:
- and his theories of genre (mystery, detective, historical)
- and his theories of response, readerly or writerly
- and his theories of simulation, absolute fakery, or hyperrealities
- as postmodern (anti-)novel, as fabula, as superfiction, as story
- as cultural criticism and/or social critique (of fascism, of consumerism)
- as a theory or interpretation of metaphor and trope
- as cross-cultural, cross-generic montage
- as exploration of possible worlds theory
Proposals are welcome for presentations (text alone or multimedia) on any of Ecos novels, including Baudolino (2001), The Island of the Day Before (1995), Foucaults Pendulum (1989), and The Name of the Rose (1984) with or without Postscript; please feel free, as well, to extend your saunter through any of his collaborations with Eugenio Carmi.
Offers of papers are invited by 1 July 2001. Please send two (2) copies of 250-300 word proposals, accompanied by a 50-word biblio-biographical sketch to either:
Corrado Federici
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
or,
Klay Dyer
Department of English Language and Literature
Brock University
500 Glenridge Avenue
St. Catharines, Ontario
L2S 3A1
Electronic (kdyer@spartan.ac.brocku.ca; in the body of the email, please) or fax (905-934-3301) submissions are welcome.