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change was not a brand-new discovery but rather the complex concoction of different venerable approaches that had characterized at many times the whole history of aesthetics and a great part of the history of semiotics. |
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Nevertheless, it is not true that nihil sub sole novum. Old (theoretical) objects can reflect a different light in the sun, according to the season. I remember how outrageous-sounding to many was my Opera aperta (1962), in which I stated that artistic and literary works, by foreseeing a system of psychological, cultural, and historical expectations on the part of their addressees, try to produce what Joyce called "an ideal reader."
2 Obviously at that time, speaking of works of art, I was interested in the fact that such an ideal reader was obliged to suffer an ideal insomnia in order to question the book ad infinitum. If there is a consistent difference between Opera aperta (1962a) and The Role of the Reader (1979), it is that in the second book I try to find the roots of artistic "openness" in the very nature of any communicative process as well as in the very nature of any system of signification (as already advocated by my A Theory of Semiotics, 1976). In any case, in 1962 my problem was how and to what extent a text should foresee the reactions of its addressee. |
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In Opera apertaat least at the time of the first Italian edition, written between 1957 and 1962I was still moving in a pre-semiotic area, inspired as I was by Information Theory, the semantics of Richards, the epistemology of Piaget, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, transactional psychology, and the aesthetic theory of interpretation of Luigi Pareyson. In that book, and with a jargon I feel ashamed of today, I was writing: |
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Now we must shift our attention from the message, as a source of possible information, to the communicative relationship between message and addressee, where the interpretative decision of the receptor contributes in establishing the value of the possible information. . . . If one wants to analyze the possibilities of a communicative structure one must take into account the receptor pole. To consider this psychological pole means to acknowledge the formal possibilityas such indispensable in order to explain both the structure and the effect of the messageby which a message signifies only insofar as it is interpreted from the point of view of a given situationa psychological as well as a historical, social and anthropological one. (Eco 1962, 2d ed., 131ff) |
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In 1967, speaking in the course of an interview about my book, just translated into French, Claude Lévi-Strauss said that he was reluctant to accept my perspective because a work of art |
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