Six Walks in the Fictional Woods: Difference between revisions

Six Walks in the Fictional Woods is a non-fiction book by Umberto Eco. Originally delivered at Harvard for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1992 and 1993, the six lectures were published in the fall of 1994.

Overview[edit]

The book derives its title from Italo Calvino‘s Six Memos for the Next Millennium but Eco also cites Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler as inspiration because the novel “is concerned with the presence of the reader in the story”, which was also the subject of the lectures and book. Furthermore, it is based on René Descartes‘ metaphorical representation of a text as a forest where his readers wander, however, without Descartes’ Hylophobia [fr]. In six chapters titled “Entering the Woods”, “The Woods of Loisy”, “Lingering in the Woods”, “Possible Woods”, “The Strange Case of Rue Servandon”, and “Fictional Protocols”, Eco contemplates on storytelling, process of creation of a literary text, and how readers understand them.

Eco introduces two types of readers and authors — model and empirical ones. Empirica writers and readers are of no interest to Eco as not being part of the text itself. On the contrary, model author and reader are integral parts of the text. The model author, by Eco, is a nexus of discursive strategies that builds the essence of the text. Meanwhile, the model reader is a set of textual instructions, integrated into the narrative. Eco mentioned that his view of a model reader resembled the Implied reader [ru] of Wolfgang Iser.

Echo suggests two ways through the ‘forest’ for the ‘model’ reader: choose a broad path that will help one reach one’s destination as quickly as possible, or walk by exploring side paths and figuring out the workings of the ‘forest’. The second way, according…