By Christopher Silvester
A. Answer the following in 30-40 words each.
Ans: The positive views on interviews are that it is a medium of communication and a source of truth and information. Some even look at it as an art. These days we know about the celebrities and others through their interviews.
Ans: Most celebrity writers despise being interviewed because they look at interviews as an unwarranted intrusion into their lives. They feel that it diminishes them. They feel that they are wounded by interviews and lose a part of themselves. They consider interviews immoral and a crime, and an unwanted and unwelcome interruption in their personal life.
Ans: Saul Bellow once described interviews as being like ‘thumbprints on his windpipe’. It means he treated interviews as a painful experience, as something that caught him by his windpipe, squeezed him and left indelible thumbprints on that. It also means that when the interviewer forces personal details from his interviewee, it becomes undesirable and cruel.
Ans: Umberto Eco does not think highly of interviewers who he thinks are a puzzled bunch of people. He has reasons for thinking so as they have often interpreted him as a novelist and clubbed him with Pen Clubs and writers, while he considers himself an academic scholar who attends academic conferences and writes novels on Sundays.
Ans: Eco humorously states that there are a lot of empty spaces in his life. He calls them ‘interstices’. There are moments when one is waiting for the other. In that empty space, Eco laughingly states that he writes an article. Then he states that he is a professor who writes novels on Sundays.
Ans: Umberto’s writings have an ethical and philosophical element underlying them. His non-fictional writing work has a certain playful and personal quality about it. Even his writings for children deal with non-violence and peace. This style of writing makes reading his novels and essays interesting and being like the reading of most academic writings. His works are marked by an informal and narrative aspect.
Ans: The success of The Name of the Rose, though a mystery to the author himself, could possibly be because it offered a difficult reading experience to the kind of readers who do not want easy reading experiences and those who look at novels as a machine for generating interpretations.
Ans: Umberto took to writing novels to satisfy his taste for narration. He did not have even a single novel to his credit, till the age of 50. One day having nothing to do, he started writing a novel. Moreover, he thought that novels have more readership and he could reach a larger audience.
B. Answer the following in 150 words each.
Ans: Umberto Eco, a professor of Semeiotics at the University of Bologna, in Italy. Semeiotics is the study of signs. He is also a well-known novelist. His scholarly works include academic texts, essays, children’s books and newspaper articles. He pursues his philosophical interests through his academic writings and novels. In spite of having reached the zeniths of intellectuality, Eco is a humble and modest scholar. He brushes aside compliments and never boasts about his achievements. He is keen to share his experiences with others and shares the secret of accomplishing so much work by revealing the facts that he makes use of time- gaps between different pieces of work. Eco follows an informal and playful style of writing with a narrative aspect. Even his research work has a quality of creative writing and makes informative as well as interesting reading.
Eco’s style is narrative, written in the manner of a story. This is in contrast to a regular academic style which is invariably depersonalized, dry and boring. His scholarly work has a certain playful and personal quality to it. He pursued his philosophical interests through his academic work and novels. He also wrote books for children on non-violence and peace.
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