Analysis Of Umberto Eco's Six Walks In The Fictional Woods

Umberto Eco in his book “Six Walks in the Fictional Woods” discusses several literature theories, which he originally told to students at the Harvard University. I, mostly, enjoyed reading it, because his vision of literature, his thoughts about books, authors, readers are different from mine, and that is one of the reasons why it is interesting. Of course, I did not understand everything, because Eco uses lots of unknown to me terminology and because of lack of experience from my side in literature and life. To begin with, I want to speak a little bit about two definitions from his first lecture “Entering the Woods.” Eco, there introduces a modal reader. But what exactly does it mean? According to Eco, “model reader - a sort of ideal type whom the text not only foresees as a collaborator but also tries to create.” (p. 9) As I understand, a modal reader is a target audience, for whom this or another book was written. It means that reader is able completely or very similar understand, feel author’s text, thoughts, vision. Unfortunately to lots of writers, most of the readers are empirical ones, which means that

In the beginning of this lecture, Eco discusses ways of walking in the woods, which I already discussed briefly. The most interesting thing, in the beginning, is, that Eco continues his thoughts about a modal reader, adding levels to this definition. He says, that any fictional text, first of all, is addressed directly to a first level modal reader, who wants to know how the story ends, who wants to understand the story by collecting pieces of the puzzle in one big completed puzzle. Basically, it is me or any other ordinary person, who read to relax, to go away from the reality. The second level is also addressed to a modal reader but in a different way. It is a level where a reader is analyzing a text, he or she identifies the structure, type, authors vision