The Open Work
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Opera aperta (1962, rev. 1976 - English translation: The Open Work (1989) is a book by Umberto Eco.
In the early 1960s, Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as "The Open Work").
In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best—although valuation terminology is not his primary area of focus. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather, they operate in the context of utterance. I. A. Richards and others said as much, but Eco draws out the implications for literature from this idea. He also extended the axis of meaning from the continually deferred meanings of words in an utterance to a play between expectation and fulfilment of meaning. Eco comes to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis (as did theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and Hans-Robert Jauss, on the other).
Table of contents
Introduction by David Robey
1 The Poetics of the Open Work
2 Analysis of Poetic Language
3 Openness, Information, Communication
4 The Open Work in the Visual Arts
5 Chance and Plot: Television and Aesthetics
6 Form as Social Commitment
7 Form and Interpretation in Luigi Pareyson's Aesthetics
8 Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art
9 The Structure of Bad Taste
11 The Death of the Gruppo 63
Notes 251
Index 277
