The Infinite List By Umberto Eco Author: Umberto Eco Category: Philosophy Books Subcategory: Philosophical Studies Publication Year: 2013 Number of Pages: 470 Publisher: Kalima In this book, Umberto Eco chronicles the list, taking the catalog of ships in Homer's Iliad as a starting point, moving through medieval literature, and ending with modern and postmodern works. In this book, he examines the phenomenon of collecting, creating lists, compiling encyclopedias, and classification throughout past ages, arguing that this approach to things throughout Western cultural history as a whole, and indeed, one can say that there is an eternal return to the theme of the list and the obsession with it that characterizes that history. Thus, Eco embarks on a critical historical endeavor, observing the Western effort to tame multiplicity and possess it within lists of things, places, wonders, collections, and treasures. This is fundamentally a critical endeavor because Eco, as mentioned, did not intend to delve into an endless historical record, but rather he identifies types of lists and then, with his profound knowledge, provides many examples of them, ranging from the visual to the verbal. These examples reach a quantity that brings to the reader's mind the World Wide Web, which Eco says: presents us with a catalog of information that makes us feel rich and infinitely capable. The book, which was produced at the invitation of the Louvre Museum, takes the reader on an enjoyable labyrinthine journey filled with pictorial representations of battle scenes, lush gardens, angels, demons, treasures, and art collections, culminating in one aspect with a picture of Campbell's soup cans, taken from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Eco explains the reason that led him to write this book: "When the Louvre invited me to organize, throughout October 2009, a series of conferences, exhibitions, public readings, concerts, film screenings, and similar events, dedicated to a topic of my own choosing, I did not hesitate for a moment and immediately proposed the topic of (the list). If a person were to read my novels, they would find them teeming with lists, and the origins of this passion were represented in two subjects I studied as a young man: medieval texts and the works of James Joyce." Umberto Eco is an Italian philosopher, literary critic, novelist, and medievalist, whose expertise was utilized in his renowned novel: "The Name of the Rose." Eco studied philosophy in the Italian city of Turin, worked in media and publishing houses, before becoming a professor of semiotics in 1971. He retired from teaching in 2007, after receiving more than 30 honorary doctorates. He is one of the most prominent semioticians in contemporary global culture, and he has written on various subjects, ranging between philosophy, literature, literary criticism, linguistics, and history. His works include: "The Limits of Interpretation," "A Theory of Semiotics," "The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts," "On Beauty," "On Ugliness," and "Foucault's Pendulum."