Umberto Eco
Italian semiotician, essayist, and novelist
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
What makes the newspaper something to fear is not (or, at least, is not only) the economic and political power that runs it. The newspaper was already defined as a medium for conditioning public opinion when the first gazettes came into being. When someone every day has to write as much news as his space allows, and it has to appear readable to an audience of diverse tastes, social class, education, throughout a country, the writer's freedom is already finished: The contents of the message will not depend on the author but on the technical and sociological characterisitcs of the medium.
—Umberto Eco, Italian semiotician, essayist, and novelist, "Reports from the Global Village", 1967
Posted on October 21, 1999 at 12:38 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."
—Umberto Eco, Italian semiotician, essayist, and novelist, Reflections on the Name of the Rose
Posted on May 7, 2001 at 9:52 AM
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