Inventing The Enemy

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0547577605
Total Pages : 276 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inventing the Enemy written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This essay collection by the revered public intellectual displays his “profound erudition, lively wit, and passion for ideas of all shapes and sizes” (Booklist). In these fourteen essays, Umberto Eco examines many of the ideas that have inspired his provocative and illuminating fiction. From the title essay—a disquisition of the notion that every country needs an enemy—he takes readers on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world. His topics range from indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists, to an examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, to censorship, violence and WikiLeaks. Here are essays full of passion, curiosity, and probing intellect by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists. “True wit and wisdom coexist with fierce scholarship inside Umberto Eco, a writer who actually knows a thing or two about being truly human.” — Buffalo News

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inventing the Enemy written by Umberto Eco and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0547640978
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inventing the Enemy and Other Occasional Writings written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays from Italian novelist Umberto Eco on a wide range of topics.

Author : Wendy Z. Goldman
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139498010
Total Pages : 333 pages
Book Rating : 4.12/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inventing the Enemy written by Wendy Z. Goldman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-08 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inventing the Enemy uses stories of personal relationships to explore the behaviour of ordinary people during Stalin's terror. Communist Party leaders strongly encouraged ordinary citizens and party members to 'unmask the hidden enemy' and people responded by flooding the secret police and local authorities with accusations. By 1937, every workplace was convulsed by hyper-vigilance, intense suspicion and the hunt for hidden enemies. Spouses, co-workers, friends and relatives disavowed and denounced each other. People confronted hideous dilemmas. Forced to lie to protect loved ones, they struggled to reconcile political imperatives and personal loyalties. Workplaces were turned into snake pits. The strategies that people used to protect themselves - naming names, pre-emptive denunciations, and shifting blame - all helped to spread the terror. Inventing the Enemy, a history of the terror in five Moscow factories, explores personal relationships and individual behaviour within a pervasive political culture of 'enemy hunting'.

Author : David E. Ruth
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226732185
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inventing the Public Enemy written by David E. Ruth and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1996-04-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth shows that the media gangster was less a reflection of reality than a projection created from Americans' values, concerns, and ideas about what would sell.

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674503953
Total Pages : 160 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Six Walks in the Fictional Woods written by Umberto Eco and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-07-21 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exhilarating book, we accompany Umberto Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples ranging from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in by means of a novelist's techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction's most basic mechanisms.

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : HMH
ISBN 13 : 0547545967
Total Pages : 322 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Travels in Hyperreality written by Umberto Eco and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-06-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A “scintillating collection” of essays on Disneyland, medieval times, and much more, from the author of Foucault’s Pendulum (Los Angeles Times). Collected here are some of Umberto Eco’s finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: “In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some ‘signs.’ These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behavior, political acts, artificial landscapes.” From Disneyland to holography and wax museums, Eco explores America’s obsession with artificial reality, suggesting that the craft of forgery has in certain cases exceeded reality itself. He examines Western culture’s enduring fascination with the middle ages, proposing that our most pressing modern concerns began in that time. He delves into an array of topics, from sports to media to what he calls the crisis of reason. Throughout these travels—both physical and mental—Eco displays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum. Translated by William Weaver

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780151013517
Total Pages : 396 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Turning Back the Clock written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2007 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The time: 2000 to 2005, the years of neoconservatism, terrorism, the twenty-four-hour news cycle, the ascension of Bush, Blair, and Berlusconi, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Umberto Eco's response is a provocative, passionate, and witty series of essays--which originally appeared in the Italian newspapers La Repubblica and L'Espresso--that leaves no slogan unexamined, no innovation unexposed. What led us into this age of hot wars and media populism, and how was it sold to us as progress? Eco discusses such topics as racism, mythology, the European Union, rhetoric, the Middle East, technology, September 11, medieval Latin, television ads, globalization, Harry Potter, anti-Semitism, logic, the Tower of Babel, intelligent design, Italian street demonstrations, fundamentalism, The Da Vinci Code, and magic and magical thinking.The famous author and respected scholar shows his practical, engaged side: an intellectual involved in events both local and global, a man concerned about taste, politics, education, ethics, and where our troubled world is headed.

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231500149
Total Pages : 168 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Serendipities written by Umberto Eco and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1998-10-06 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling author Umberto Eco's latest work unlocks the riddles of history in an exploration of the "linguistics of the lunatic," stories told by scholars, scientists, poets, fanatics, and ordinary people in order to make sense of the world. Exploring the "Force of the False," Eco uncovers layers of mistakes that have shaped human history, such as Columbus's assumption that the world was much smaller than it is, leading him to seek out a quick route to the East via the West and thus fortuitously "discovering" America. The fictions that grew up around the cults of the Rosicrucians and Knights Templar were the result of a letter from a mysterious "Prester John"—undoubtedly a hoax—that provided fertile ground for a series of delusions and conspiracy theories based on religious, ethnic, and racial prejudices. While some false tales produce new knowledge (like Columbus's discovery of America) and others create nothing but horror and shame (the Rosicrucian story wound up fueling European anti-Semitism) they are all powerfully persuasive. In a careful unraveling of the fabulous and the false, Eco shows us how serendipities—unanticipated truths—often spring from mistaken ideas. From Leibniz's belief that the I Ching illustrated the principles of calculus to Marco Polo's mistaking a rhinoceros for a unicorn, Eco tours the labyrinth of intellectual history, illuminating the ways in which we project the familiar onto the strange. Eco uncovers a rich history of linguistic endeavor—much of it ill-conceived—that sought to "heal the wound of Babel." Through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, and Egyptian were alternately proclaimed as the first language that God gave to Adam, while—in keeping with the colonial climate of the time—the complex language of the Amerindians in Mexico was viewed as crude and diabolical. In closing, Eco considers the erroneous notion of linguistic perfection and shrewdly observes that the dangers we face lie not in the rules we use to interpret other cultures but in our insistence on making these rules absolute. With the startling combination of erudition and wit, bewildering anecdotes and scholarly rigor that are Eco's hallmarks, Serendipities is sure to entertain and enlighten any reader with a passion for the curious history of languages and ideas.

Author : Umberto Eco
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0544974573
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.79/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Chronicles of a Liquid Society written by Umberto Eco and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed author examines our contemporary world—from technology to politics and pop culture—in this collection of essays written for L’Espresso. Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and novelist observes the changing world around him with irrepressible curiosity and philosophical insight. He illuminates the contemporary upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives—creating a “liquid” society that defies any organizing principle. In these pieces, written for his regular column in the Italian magazine L’Espresso, Eco brings his dazzling erudition and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as being seen, conspiracies, the old and the young, mass media, racism, and good manners. It is “a swan song from one of Europe’s great intellectuals…[Eco] entertains with his intellect, humor, and insatiable curiosity” (Kirkus Reviews). “An intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores.” —Publishers Weekly