Ruins --- Course Blog

The assignment for your midterm essay was to critique (as in analyze) some of what you find connecting Horkheimer and Adorno's Culture Industry chapter, Eco's essay on Casablanca, and Borges' Pierre Menard.

Keeping in mind what you found in answering this question, discuss them in the context of Stuart Hall's article "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies" from the During reader.

Hall lays out a genealogy of Cultural Studies that addresses some of the political commitments involved in this work. His implicit argument is that the era when work in Cultural Studies maintained its coherence through these shared objects of study, interventions, commitments, and ideologies has come to an end. Paradoxically, this end comes precisely when Cultural Studies becomes institutionalized in the universities in the United States. This may be, as Marx would have had it, either tragic or farcical. But the question to consider is less whether Cultural Studies is viable as an academic field, than it is to consider whether or not the work that you have encountered is still of use, or if its theoretical legacies render it only of historical interest. What do you think can be salvaged from the wreckage?
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Your essay should be concise, and should not exceed 8-12 typed pages.

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In the New York Times Magazine today is a short "interview" with Eco. "Interview" because reporter writer has been known to violate Times policy and condense or alter or take out of context what was said. The NYTimes own Public Editor did a couple of pieces recently on the issue. Nevertheless, it is worth reading if only because of Eco's views on media, politics, and his "invention" of Dan Brown.
You have to register with the Times (it is free) to view the article.

Questions for Umberto Eco
Media Studies
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: November 25, 2007
Q: Although you’re known best as the author of the highbrow murder mystery “The Name of the Rose,” you’re also a prolific political commentator whose essays have now been collected in a book, “Turning Back the Clock,” in which you warn against the dangers of “media populism.” How would you define that term?

A: Media populism means appealing to people directly through media. A politician who can master the media can shape political affairs outside of parliament and even eliminate the mediation of parliament.

Q: Much of your book is an assault on Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister of Italy who used his media empire to assist his political ends.

A: From ’94 to ’95, and from 2001 to 2006, Berlusconi was the richest man in Italy, the prime minister, the owner of three TV channels and controller of the three state channels. He is a phenomenon that could happen and is maybe happening in other countries. And the mechanism will be the same.

But here we have the F.C.C. and other federal agencies to prevent the sort of monopolies that would allow a politician to control the country’s newspapers and TV stations. In the States, there is still a great separation between the media and political power, at least in principle.

Q: So why would any country besides Italy be at risk of having the media takeover you describe?

A: One of the reasons why foreigners are so interested in the Italian case is that Italy was in the last century a laboratory. It started with the Futurists. Their manifesto was in 1909. Then fascism — it was tested in the Italian laboratory and then it migrated to Spain, to the Balkans, to Germany.

Q: Are you saying that Germany got the idea of fascism from Italy?

A: Oh, certainly. According to what the historians say, it is so.

Maybe just the Italian historians. If you don’t like it, don’t tell it. I am indifferent.

Q: You’re saying that Italy was a trendsetter in both fashion — or art — and fascism?

A: Yes, O.K., why not?

Q: What do you make of Berlusconi’s successor, Romano Prodi, who was elected last year and has shifted the government leftward?

A: He is a friend. I like him, but I think he has been overwhelmed by the infighting after the election within his own majority. Berlusconi has the advantage of being a big actor. Prodi is not an actor, which is not a crime, but it is a weakness.

Prodi is an intellectual as opposed to a businessman? Yes, he was a professor of economics. In the early ’90s, Prodi was also a teacher in one of my programs. Suddenly he went into politics.

Q: You’re referring to the department of communications at the University of Bologna, where you’re a professor of semiotics.

A: I retired this month. I am 75.

Q: Have you ever wanted to go into politics?

A: No, because I think everybody must do his job.

Q: Do you see yourself mainly as a novelist?

A: I feel that I am a scholar who only with the left hand writes novels.

Q: I am wondering if you read Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code,” which some critics see as the pop version of your “Name of the Rose.”

A: I was obliged to read it because everybody was asking me about it. My answer is that Dan Brown is one of the characters in my novel, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” which is about people who start believing in occult stuff.

Q: But you yourself seem interested in the kabbalah, alchemy and other occult practices explored in the novel.

A: No, in “Foucault’s Pendulum” I wrote the grotesque representation of these kind of people. So Dan Brown is one of my creatures.

Q: Do you care if people read your novels 100 years from now?

A: If somebody writes a book and doesn’t care for the survival of that book, he’s an imbecile.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED, CONDENSED AND EDITED BY DEBORAH SOLOMON

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