SOURCE: “Eco's Echoes: Ironizing the (Post)Modern,” in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism, Vol. 22, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 2-16.

In the following essay, Hutcheon traces the narrative development of irony in Foucault's Pendulum, highlighting the novel's representation of semiotic differences between modern and postmodern literary traditions.

When one theorist publishes a book—a novel, at that—which contains in its title the name of another theorist, the academic reader is likely to be unable to resist looking for “in-group” ironies. When that novelist-theorist is Umberto Eco, who just happens to be someone who rarely mentions Michel Foucault by name, puzzlement may jostle for position with irony, even if we realize that Jean Bernard Léon Foucault was a nineteenth-century physicist whose famous pendulum hangs in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. Nevertheless, I want to argue that it is almost impossible not to think of...