Digital Commons Network^™

Understanding Lists: Umberto Eco's Rhetoric Of Communication And Signification, Susan Mancino

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project, Understanding Lists: Umberto Eco’s Rhetoric of Communication and Signification, begins and ends with an observation and warning suggested throughout Eco’s work: lists are the origin of culture and the Internet as the Mother of All Lists threatens to end culture. To understand this warning, I turn to Eco’s work on lists, contextualized within a 2009 exhibition at the Musée du Louvre and in an illustrated collection, The Infinity of Lists. This project offers an analysis of Eco’s understanding of lists concurrent to his commentary on the social and cultural implications of the algorithmic-obsessed Internet age. To understand …