"Postscript to The Name of the Rose" by Umberto Eco (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984)

• "the rose is a symbolic figure so rich in meanings that by now it hardly has any meaning left", (p.3)
• "I would define poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed" (p.8)
• "It is necessary to create constraints in order to invent freely" (p. 2 5)
• "when a writer plans something new, and conceives a different kind of reader, he wants to be, not a market analyst, cataloguing expressed demands, but, rather, a philosopher, who senses the pattern of the Zeitgeist. He wants to reveal to his public what it should want, even if it does not know it. He wants to reveal the reader to himself" (p. 4 9)
• "the rediscovery not only of plot but also of enjoyability, was to be realized by the American theorists of postmodernism" (p.6 5)
• "every period has its own postmodernism, just as every period would have its mannerism (and, in fact, I wonder if postmodernism is not the modern name for mannerism)" (p.6 6)