Six Walks in the Fictional Woods

One of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction. Umberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel The Name of the Rose when he was forty-eight years old, yet he believed that everything he had written to that point—from treatises on semiotics to essays on mass culture—took the form of a story. To Eco, scholarship, much like fiction, was shaped by narrative. It was the stuff of life itself. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, a collection of essays based on Eco’s 1992–1993 Norton Lectures at Harvard, illuminates fiction’s porous boundaries—in particular, the myriad ways that literary works conscript readers’ experiences and expectations.