This course takes as its point of departure Umberto Eco’s encyclopedic The Name of the Rose. Eco’s novel is many things—detective story, parody, historical novel, experiment in semiotics, meditation on heresy and orthodoxy, to name just a few. Reading it against the broad range of texts which form/inform it (from Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex to the Song of Songs to stories by Poe and Conan Doyle), we will perform a series of case studies in critical reading, while assembling a vocabulary of theoretical terms and concepts.

Required texts:

Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (Harvest)
Sophocles, The Oedipus Cycle, trans. Fitzgerald and Fitts (Harvest)
Edgar Allan Poe, Eighteen Best Stories (Laurel)
Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories v. I (Bantam Classics)
Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New Directions)

Excerpts from Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams; Aristotle, Poetics; Alanus de Insulis, The Complaint of Nature; Lacan, “Seminar on the Purloined Letter”; Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Bernard McGinn, Antichrist; and various articles and essays by Eco.