Umberto Eco’s New Paradigm and Experimentalism in the 1960s
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In this paper I analyse the results of a paradigmatic shift in the history of experimental
writing. Drawing from the historiographical structure of natural sciences proposed by
Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), I read Umberto Eco’s theory
of the ‘open work’ as a narrativisation of that shift or ‘change of paradigm’. In The Open
Work (1962) Eco reads James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) as a watershed for Western history.
Joyce’s writing, according to Eco, offered a successful response to the European context of
the 1920s that would change the experience of reading and writing forever, as well as the
understanding of literary experimentation. This Joycean shift becomes apparent in the 1960s,
when experimental publications by authors such as Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, Bryan
Stanley Johnson and Georges Perec indicate that something characteristic was shared under
this new paradigm; something that I call an experimentalism.
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