Novelist, theoretical philosopher, structural linguist, Eco is every inch the intellectual prima donna, or if you prefer, an older generation’s answer to James Franco. This is paraphrasing Anthony Burgess, but I only do so because I couldn’t have put it better myself. Now that it’s here to stay, why bother any more with it than we have to?Īfter much deliberation, I’ve finally gotten around to reading Umberto Eco’s 1980 debut novel “The Name Of The Rose.” Eco’s a true polymath in the sense that he knows far too much for any one man. We’d prefer to think against the judgment of thousands of years of philosophical discourse and say that one day, language simply precipitated from the sky. Gertrude Stein might just have easily said that word is a word is a word. What’s in a name, anyway? Or for that matter, what’s in a word? Most of us probably don’t care. There’s a fairly good chance that for the majority of us, these lines have been read, essayed about, or playacted at least once, provided we read our required Shakespeare in high school. “Tis but thy name that is my enemy…/What’s in a name?”
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