Misreadings

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by Umberto Eco,

Translated by William Weaver

Harcourt

Due/Published April 1993, 180 pages, paper

ISBN 0156607522

In an upside-down Lolita, Umberto Umberto pursues a granny with "whitely lascivious locks." Columbus's landing in the New World is covered by television reporters, commentators, and guest experts. In addition, we are given a social and structural analysis of the art of striptease as performed by Lilly Niagara of the Crazy Horse; we are privy to in-house publisher reader's reports, most of them unfavorable, on such submissions as The Odyssey and Don Quixote; and we hear a diatribe against the mounting tide of vulgarity in Greece, the new democratic "culture industry" of such upstarts as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Plato, not to mention public playing of the flute.

Umberto Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way has some penetrating comments to make about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art and criticism.

About the Author:
Umberto Eco is a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. He lives in Milan, Italy.