The Architecture of the Infinite Library Teaching

THE DESCRIPTION OF The Na11'!e of the Rose that appears on the dust-jacket of -its first edition declares that the novel is difficult to define since, among other reasons, "the author asserts, perhaps mendaciously, that not one word is his own" (qtd. in Stephens 1983, 51). Readers conversant with theories of intertextuality and with Eco's own theoretical writings will readily discern a conspicuous mock naivete in this assertion---that not one word is the author's own-and a wink and nudge in its "perhaps mendaciously" qualifier, for in this suitably and perhaps coyly anonymous paratext, we find the first tenet of intertextuality: that words are never one's own, that speakersand authors-find them, as. Mikhail Bakhtin put it, always "already inhabited" (1984,201). To be slire, this is intertextuality in a radical sense, but The Name of the Rose is radicallyintertextual in an ordinary sense as well. Walter E. Stephens calls it "this most intertextual of novels" (1983, 55), and Teresa de Lauretis describes it as "a novel made up almost entirely of other texts, of tales already told, of names either well known or sounding as if they should be known ... a medley of famous passages and obscure quotations ... and characters cut out in strips from a generic World Encyclopedia" (1985, 16-17). As a novel so knowingly and, as its dust-jacket description hints, so playfully pieced together from other texts, The Name of the Rose makes a superb novel for exploring intertextuality with students. At the same time, as 52 ARCHITECTURE OF THE INFINITE LIBRARY 53