Making Enemies

Name: Making Enemies
ISBN: 9787532784912

Umberto Eco / 李婧敬Shanghai Translation Publishing House · ChinaJan 2021

4.0

Word count: 153K words
Chapters: 17
ISBN: 9787532784912

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Summary

Stories of Enemies is a collection of occasional pieces by Umberto Eco. It gathers fifteen essays that range across time and cultures and move through multiple worlds, bringing the writer's many identities together in one volume: here we see Eco the scholar's philosophical reflection and literary preoccupations, Eco the public intellectual using the past to critique the present and taking aim at contemporary ills, traces of Eco the novelist's craft, and the playful Eco writing about the textures of life with whimsical ingenuity. Encyclopedic in scope, it leaves you awed by Eco's brilliance while discovering a country you have never reached.

Editor's review

Umberto Eco's Stories of Enemies is not a novel in the conventional sense but a distillation of the intellectual sparks thrown off by this encyclopedic scholar in his later years. The book collects lectures and articles Eco published between 2011 and 2015 on various occasions, with themes spanning medieval semiotics, contemporary popular culture, political commentary, and personal memories of reading. As an editor, I believe the book's core value lies in the superb window it offers onto how a top-tier intellectual dissects our bizarre era with his distinctive "toolbox"—prodigious erudition, sharp insight, and inexhaustible curiosity. Pieces such as those on "fabricated enemies" and "the absolute and the relative" possess striking prescience and deep explanatory power for understanding the group antagonism and opinion polarization of the social-media age. Eco's style is as ever, moving effortlessly between erudition and humor, seriousness and jest, presenting weighty intellectual issues with a light touch. This may not be the best entry point into Eco's world, but it is certainly a highly captivating concentrated display of his intellectual spectrum, in which readers can feel a pure intellectual pleasure and an old-school public intellectual's steadfast commitment to reason and tolerance.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Readers with a strong interest in Umberto Eco's thought and writing style
Knowledge lovers who enjoy interdisciplinary essays rich in wide-ranging references
Observers concerned with contemporary media culture, social currents, and political rhetoric
Those seeking deep thinking and intellectual challenge amid fragmented reading

Not a good fit for

Readers expecting a long narrative novel by Eco (such as The Name of the Rose)
Readers who prefer short commentaries or social-science arguments with a clear structure and a single thesis

Reading tips

Treat the book as an intellectual ramble; there is no need to read it in order—start from topics that interest you.
Keep pen and paper or a digital notebook handy to record the books, figures, and concepts Eco mentions, and follow the threads to expand your own map of knowledge.
Try setting the book's ideas—especially the analyses of "creating enemies" and "mass media"—against phenomena in today's online society; the contrast will deepen your understanding.

About the publisher

Shanghai Translation Publishing House China · Founded in 1978

Shanghai Translation Publishing House is a Chinese publisher oriented mainly toward translation and publishing. Its publications cover foreign literature, world classics and classic works, as well as social culture, folk literature and classical poetry. The database contains 2,618 titles, including Never Let Me Go, Les Misérables (2 volumes), Don Quixote (illustrated collector's edition), The Complete Comedies of Molière (4 volumes), The Complete Novels of Kafka (3 volumes), The Collected Works of Dostoevsky (9-volume set), Reason and Persons, and Oedipus Rex (Translation Classics). Its author resources include foreign writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Victor Hugo, Cervantes and Molière, as well as translators such as Zheng Kelu, Sun Jiameng, Li Jianwu and Zhang Kun. The publisher has brands such as "Translation Classics Selections" and "Translation Documentary," and emphasizes translated works in foreign literature and the humanities and social sciences, while also publishing bilingual dictionaries and foreign-language educational books. Public information is limited; the above is based on the book information in the database.

版权信息
序
树敌
绝对与相对
火之炫
寻宝
发酵的美味
天堂之外的胚胎
四十年后的六三学社
雨果，唉！论其对极致的崇尚
电视女郎与保持缄默
虚构的天文学
既入乡，且随俗
我是爱德蒙·唐泰斯！
《尤利西斯》：我们的惦念
岛屿缘何总难寻
关于“维基解密”之反思

FAQ

How does this book differ from Eco's other works, such as The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum?

Stories of Enemies is a collection of Eco's essays and lectures, a work of nonfiction that concentrates on his scholarly thought, cultural commentary, and social observation; The Name of the Rose and the others are novels, which, though steeped in learning, use fictional narrative as their vehicle. This book presents Eco's thinking more directly as a scholar and public intellectual.

Can I understand this book without relevant background knowledge?

Though Eco's writing ranges very widely, he is adept at guiding readers with vivid examples and clear logic. General readers may encounter unfamiliar names and concepts, but this usually does not prevent them from grasping the core ideas; instead, it can stimulate curiosity and be treated as an eye-opening intellectual adventure.

What themes does this book mainly discuss?

The themes are very broad and include: the social and rhetorical construction of "enemies" or "others"; the continuity and rupture between medieval and modern culture; the mechanisms and effects of mass media (especially the internet); a critique of absolutism and fanaticism; and playful reflections on reading, writing, and lists.

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About the author

Umberto Eco Author · Italian · 1932–2016

Umberto Eco was an Italian writer, semiotician and philosopher, born in Alessandria in 1932 and died in Milan in 2016; he was a professor at the University of Bologna. He combined the roles of scholar and novelist: his academic works include A Theory of Semiotics, The Open Work and The Limits of Interpretation, which explore signs, texts and the boundaries of interpretation, while his novels are best known for The Name of the Rose, published in 1980, which has been translated into many languages and has won several literary prizes. He later wrote such works as Foucault's Pendulum and The Prague Cemetery, often blending history, mystery and philosophical reflection. In the Chinese-speaking world his books are classified under foreign literature, mystery and philosophy, and twenty-five of his works are included in the collection.

李婧敬 Author

Li Jingjing: publicly available information is limited, and this name appears mainly in Chinese translations of foreign literature. The library holds four related works, including the twelve-volume collection of Umberto Eco's major representative works, The Minerva Matchbox, Inventing the Enemy, and Pape Satan Aleppe: Chronicles of a Liquid Society. These works are largely connected with the writings of the Italian author Umberto Eco and span foreign literature, essays and miscellaneous writings, and social-science discussion, while also offering the pleasure of suspenseful reading. Judging from the titles and categories, the translated content leans toward intellectual essays, cultural commentary, and social observation, with a style balanced between the lightness of the essay and the rigor of argument, giving Chinese readers accessible texts for understanding Eco's familiar essays and speculative writing.