Serendipities

Language And Lunacy

Prof Umberto Eco, William Weaver

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Italian

Phoenix
01 September 1999

Sociolinguistics; Literary theory; Philosophy; History of ideas; Folklore, myths & legends

"In this work, Umberto Eco demonstrates how myths and lunacies can produce historical developments of no small significance. In Eco's words, ""even errors can produce interesting side effects"". This book shows how: believers in a flat earth helped Columbus accidentally discover America; how the medieval myth of Prester John, the Christian king in Asia, assisted the European drive eastward; and how the myth of the Rosicrucians affected the Masons, leading in turn to the widespread belief in a Jewish masonic plot to dominate the world and other forms of paranoid anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries."

By: Prof Umberto Eco
Translated by: William Weaver
Imprint: Phoenix
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 169mm, Spine: 14mm
Weight: 156g
ISBN: 9780753808788
ISBN 10: 0753808781
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 01 September 1999
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Umberto Eco is Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna and one of the world's most famous -- and admired -- writers.

Reviews for Serendipities: Language And Lunacy

In this collection of five lectures the author of The Name of the Rose takes us on a series of thought-provoking journeys down the byways of language and intellectual history. The theme of the volume is the great falsehoods or mistakes which changed the world. Thus Columbus discovered America while looking for something else; and a completely bogus letter of the 12th century, claiming that Christian people existed in the East, stimulated a huge expansion of Western civilization towards the Orient over the next 500 years. Eco also repeatedly returns to the quest to find the universal language said to have existed before the confusion of tongues at the Tower of Babel. Witty, erudite and encyclopedic. (Kirkus UK)