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Six Walks In The Fictional Woods

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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 wanted to speak a little bit about two definitions from his first lecture “Entering the Woods.” Eco, there introduces a model reader. But what exactly does it mean? According to Eco, “model reader - a sort of ideal type whom the text …show more content…

Is it good or bad? I think no because everyone thinks differently, everyone chooses their own path. So do I. It is up to me, what I will choose, where I will go, what I will think about. It is like walking in the woods (about what Eco told in his lecture), where are lots of trails, paths and every one of them will lead a reader to a whole different thing. It does not matter, will it be wrong or correct, because we all make mistakes and we all learn from them, “it is right for me while walking in the wood to use every experience and every discovery to learn about life, about the past and the future” (p. 9). If I will choose incorrect path while reading, if I will come to a deadlock with understanding a text, later on, I will go back to the beginning and try another path. But if in literature we are able to go back and start from the beginning, in real life it is mostly impossible. That’s why I think books are a good place to make mistakes, to try different paths, to choose the correct one, to gain more experience. But this is not what I wanted to

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