"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed"
About this Quote
Eco is smuggling a dare into what sounds like a tidy definition: the best writing refuses to be finished with. “Poetic effect” isn’t a halo of prettiness here; it’s a measure of a text’s resistance to closure. The line treats literature less like a message delivered and more like a machine that keeps producing meaning when you return to it under new lights - new politics, new griefs, new obsessions. A truly “consumed” text is one you can summarize without loss. Eco is arguing that art’s power begins where summarizability ends.
The phrasing matters. “Capacity” makes the effect feel engineered, almost structural, not mystical inspiration. And “continuing to generate” borrows the language of systems: a poem or novel as a meaning-engine, not a sacred object. That’s classic Eco, the semiotician who spent a career explaining how signs travel, mutate, and recruit readers as co-authors. The subtext pushes against two temptations at once: the authoritarian critic who declares the One True Interpretation, and the lazy relativism that says anything goes. Eco’s larger project (from The Open Work to his famous arguments about “overinterpretation”) insists on openness with constraints: the text can yield multiple readings, but it still sets the terms of play.
Context sharpens the point. Writing in a 20th-century Europe saturated with propaganda, mass media, and ideological totalities, Eco saw interpretation as both pleasure and civic practice. A text that can’t be “completely consumed” trains readers to live with ambiguity, to suspect final answers, and to keep reading - which is also a way of staying free.
The phrasing matters. “Capacity” makes the effect feel engineered, almost structural, not mystical inspiration. And “continuing to generate” borrows the language of systems: a poem or novel as a meaning-engine, not a sacred object. That’s classic Eco, the semiotician who spent a career explaining how signs travel, mutate, and recruit readers as co-authors. The subtext pushes against two temptations at once: the authoritarian critic who declares the One True Interpretation, and the lazy relativism that says anything goes. Eco’s larger project (from The Open Work to his famous arguments about “overinterpretation”) insists on openness with constraints: the text can yield multiple readings, but it still sets the terms of play.
Context sharpens the point. Writing in a 20th-century Europe saturated with propaganda, mass media, and ideological totalities, Eco saw interpretation as both pleasure and civic practice. A text that can’t be “completely consumed” trains readers to live with ambiguity, to suspect final answers, and to keep reading - which is also a way of staying free.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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