SOURCE: “The Imaginary Universe of Umberto Eco: A Reading of Foucault's Pendulum,”¹ in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 38, No. 4, Winter, 1992, pp. 894-909.

In the following essay, Cannon examines the central theme of Foucault's Pendulum in cultural and theoretical contexts of Eco's life and work, deconstructing the way the novel questions the main tenor of the author's thought.

In the introduction to The Role of the Reader Umberto Eco argues that a model reader is inscribed in the open work by its author. “An author can foresee an ‘ideal reader affected by an ideal insomnia’ (as happens with Finnegans Wake) able to master different codes and eager to deal with the text as with a maze of many issues” (9). Umberto Eco would seem to be not only the ideal “model reader” but the only empirical reader whose competence is sufficiently encyclopedic to do justice to The Name of the Rose...