SOURCE: A review of Travels in Hyper Reality, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 168-69.

In the following review, Dick identifies the themes and basic technique of Travels in Hyper Reality, with a few provocative exceptions, as essentially nothing new.

Although Eco insists that his collection of essays [Travels in Hyper Reality] is not a book on semiotics, it really is; or, at least it is a book about signs in the sense of channels of information that increase one's knowledge of something. Thus holography is a sign of America's obsession with the replication of the real; Hearst's San Simeon and Disneyland are complementary aspects of California's fantasy landscape; jeans promote “epidermic self-awareness” by encouraging a sense of the exterior. Film is a natural subject for semioticians, and it is a medium in which Eco has shown an increasing interest. In what will probably be the...