On Literature（ISBN=9780156032391）

In this collection of essays and addresses delivered over the course of his illustrious career, Umberto Eco seeks "to understand the chemistry of his] passion" for the word. From musings on Ptolemy and "the force of the false" to reflections on the experimental writing of Borges and Joyce, Eco's luminous intelligence and encyclopedic knowledge are on dazzling display throughout. And when he reveals his own ambitions and superstitions, his authorial anxieties and fears, one feels like a secret sharer in the garden of literature to which he so often alludes.
        Remarkably accessible and unfailingly stimulating, this collection exhibits the diversity of interests and the depth of knowledge that have made Eco one of the world's leading writers.

Umberto Eco is the author of four bestselling novels, The Name of The Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of The Day Before, and, most recently, Baudolino. His collections of essays include Five Moral Pieces, Kant and the Platypus, Serendipities, Travels In Hyperreality, and How To Travel With a Salmon and Other Essays. A Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna, Umberto Eco lives in Italy.

Introduction
On Some Functions of Literature
A Reading of the Paradiso
On the Style of The Communist Manifesto
The Mists of the Valois
Wilde: Paradox and Aphorism
A Portrait of the Artist as Bachelor
Between La Mancha and Babel
Borges and My Anxiety of Influence
On Camporesi: Blood, Body, Life
On Symbolism
On Style
Les Sdmaphores sous la Pluie
The Flaws in the Form
Intertextual Irony and Levels of Reading
The Poetics and Us
The American Myth in Three Anti-American Generations
The Power of Falsehood
How I Write