I’ve always been a fan of Umberto Eco, and not only of his fiction (of which my favorite is The Name of the Rose). Eco’s essays, thoughts on popular culture as filtered through his semiotic lens, are always good for re-conceptualizing the way we view everyday items. For instance, I’ve used his essay “Lumbar Thought,” in which Eco examines how the clothing we wear impacts the way that we think, in several of my English composition classes, in order to force my students to think about the possible repercussions of how they dress. Eco’s semiotic analysis is similar to what Roland Barthes does in collections like Mythologies, but I think Eco does it with more panache.
All of that to say that good old Umberto is coming out with a new collection of essays entitled On Ugliness (isn’t that a much better title than On Beauty, which he also wrote?). There’s an excerpt in the L.A. Times.
There’s also a review in The Village Voice.
