Talking of Joyce

Author Biography

Umberto Eco is Emeritus Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna and visiting Professor at numerous distinguished universities in Europe and the USA. Eco has written extensively on aesthetics, medieval studies, language, epistemology, theory of literature, mass media and popular culture, avant-garde poetics, and James Joyce. Eco has also gained international fame beyond academia with several best-selling novels including the most recently published Number Zero. Liberato Santoro-Brienze retired from University College Dublin, he held an honorary Chair of Philosophy at the University of Auckland and is now Professor of Philosophy at the Royal Hibernian Academy. He is the author of essays on various philosophical themes and textual analyses, the history of ideas, aesthetics, art criticism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory. Among his books must be mentioned La filosofia della musica nel pensiero di T.W. Adorno, Presupposti filosofici dell'arte moderna, The Tortoise and the Lyre, The Dialectics of Desire, Philosophies of Art and Beauty (co-authored with Hugh Bredin).

Description

This new and expanded edition of Talking of Joyce focuses on James Joyce's cultural ancestry - aesthetic and linguistic, in particular - and his Italian influences and connections. Originally published in 1998, to great success, this new and revised edition brings original scholarship to contemporary readers and contains an insightful added essay on Joyce's aesthetic musings. In his foreword, the internationally renowned Coleridge scholar J. C. C. Mays praises the original essays by Eco and Santoro-Brienza for being both highly respectful of Joyce and for their friendly familiarity with him. Mays also notes that 'These commentaries, by Italians in English, of an author of books in English who preferred to speak Italian, are a rich and illuminating conjunction. Read these lectures for the way they are, for they brings together two worlds. Their eminent authors do not stand on dignity: they communicate directly what is important. They have different things to say, but each celebrates values which Joyce held most dear.'The addition of Santoro-Brienza's new essay also gives readers a fresh insight into Eco's unique contribution to our understanding of Joyce, Aquinas and aesthetics, and was written in honour of Eco's eightieth birthday. This volume brings to light fascinating aspects of Ireland's most famous literary figure and places him in a wider cultural context. From two renowned scholars, passionately interested in the Irish revolutionary writer, Talking of Joyce is a welcome addition to our reckoning with Joyce's legacy and is a fascinating contribution to Joyce studies.