Claudio Iván Remeseira
New York City
Claudio Iván Remeseira (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1960.) Writer and journalist. Director of the Hispanic New York Project of The American Studies Program, Columbia University. In 2005, he was the editor for the prototype of The New York Times’ international edition in Argentina. From 2004 to 2007, he wrote literary criticism and book reviews for Diario Rumbo (San Antonio, Texas); in the US, his journalistic and literary work has also appeared in Viva Magazine and Hora Hispana (Daily News) and El Nuevo Día (Puerto Rico). From 1998 to 2005, contributor to La Nación, Argentina’s second largest-selling daily. He also held positions in the following Argentine media: Temas magazine, managing editor; Mercado Semanal, managing editor; Green Letter, environmental supplement of Apertura, Argentina’s leading business magazine, copy editor; Página/12, a mass-circulation daily, contributor; and Noticias magazine, contributor. Former Radio Continental correspondent in New York City (2001-2004) and anchor and producer for the radio talk show Aunque Usted No lo lea (1997-2001) and the TV cable show Alerta Verde (1994). B.A. (Licenciatura in Philosophy), University of Buenos Aires (1990); M.A. in Journalism, Columbia University (2002).From 2002 to 2005, adjunct professor of Composition and Rhetoric at The College of New Rochelle and Boricua College, New York City. From 1991 to 2001, assistant professor of Social and Political Theory at the School of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires. Distinctions and awards: Maria Moors Cabot Scholarship (2001-2002), Argentine Publishers Association Awards (First Prize in the Economic Journalism category, 2000; Second Prize in the Environmental Journalism category), Citibank Journalistic Excellence Award for Economic and Business Journalism (2000). He is the author of an unpublished book of short stories and is currently finishing his first novel and editing a book on the Hispanic cultural heritage of New York City.
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Sunday, May 4, 2008 3:27PM
Umberto Eco at Cooper Union
Listening to Umberto Eco give his Arthur Miller Lecture in front of a packed and fascinated auditorium at Cooper Union last Sunday night, one can easily understand the reason of his world-wide appeal. Eco is the Pavarotti of the Academy, a scholar who is able to deliver with ease the highest notes of thought, an expert who can communicate to the general public of non-specialists ideas originally forged in the highbrow world of university research and debate among specialists, in a clear, effective language, unburdened of the dubious cloak of semiotic or philosophical jargon.
Moreover, the things he talks about touch the very center of our lives -- the meaning and relevance of fiction, humankind’s unremitting hunger for storytelling and memorable fictive characters-- notions embedded in the Western humanist tradition that is currently looked down with a smirk, if not overly despised, in many humanities and literature Departments across the US and abroad.
And he does so with inevitable Italian flavor, something that is apparently even more alluring for US audiences. Unlike other intellectuals, academic or not, who sound aloof and “professorial” in everyday speech, Professor Eco sounds matter-of-fact and earthly, yet authoritative, being as he is one of the leading intellectuals of the last century. It seems to me that the most natural venue for his lectures is not the classroom or the conference hall but a tavern, sharing a lively exchange with his occasional interlocutors in front of a lavishly served dinner table and a bottle of Chianti, or a peripathetic stroll in the countryside. I guess it is this sunny, entertaining quality of his public persona what triggers such a grateful response from his audience.
In his lecture, on The Advantages of Literature of Life and Death, Eco elaborated on arguments that he have been championing over the last two decades (see http://www.umbertoeco.com/id-28/Denis_Dutton_on_Umberto_Eco.html) and that are part of his debate with the most radical strains of Deconstructionism (which at some point later in the interview Eco dubbed as “an American disease”, to differentiate it from Derrida’s original version). By creating characters and situations that endure in our imagination, novelists and storytellers educate us in the sense of the “what if”. Fiction seems to work as a sort of mental laboratory where the reader can endlessly recreate the character’s life and experiences, pretending that they are true, and projecting himself of herself onto them in order to get some insight about the human condition.
Fictional statements are truthful in a different sense that empirical statements are – they designate literary entities that have an eternal life in the cultural imagination of the species. “I know Stephen Dedalus better than I know my own father”, said Eco. The life of real people is full of details and information that we might never fully know, no matter how close we are to them, but a fictional character is a roundup, imaginary being made up of words that exist forever in the limited space of the printed page.
It is precisely the factual nature of the text, the very statements that constitute it, what sets a limit to interpretation. Here Eco makes clear his disagreement with the relativism that dominates much of contemporary literary theory. Denying that he has corrected himself from earlier positions, he still advocates the “openess” of the literary work, but establishing at the same time the “loyalty to the text” as the ultimate criterion for determining the validity of any interpretation. “There is nothing in The Three Musketeers that may allow us to say that D’Artagan is homosexual, no single statement from which we can infer that – maybe Aramis, but not D’Artagnan.”
Eco’s position on this regard will hardly put an end to the debate (one might argue, for instance, what about the unconscious desires of a character, subtly betrayed by the text itself, or the socio-economic or cultural conditions that shape the characters’ actions, but of which they are not totally aware?). But it is certainly refreshing to hear this argument voiced so convincingly.
The welcoming remarks, by PEN American Center’s president Francine Prose, were brief and to the point. Adam Gopkin was a gracious and apt interviewer. However, there are two questions that I would’ve liked to hear him ask Eco (would it have been possible to include a Q&A session with the audience?):
- Given the dwindling presence of fiction among the books currently published in the US, what does that tell us about the general situation of our culture?
- Eco’s argument about the relevance of fiction is paralleled by the statements of the so-called literary Darwinism, the most recent and powerful rebuttal of post-modern relativism. What does he make of the work of critics such as Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson?
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