Mobility Humanities

This paper posits that Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose may be read as a postmodernist critique of the Middle Ages from the lens of spatiotemporal mobility theory. Specifically, an aesthetic infrastructure of mobility is deployed through a three-tiered conception of time; namely: (1) chronological-historical time, (2) psychological/sensuous time, and (3) the time invoked by the novel as a palimpsest. Spatially, the novel is built on a fluid concept of the pilgrimage that is deployed through the following aesthetic frames: (1) as a theological/religious construct; (2) as a physical representation of mobility; and, (3) as a psychological pilgrimage embarked by the characters and the readers as they make sense of the narrative/novel as a palimpsest. The article also references Ian Davidson’s idea of “mobilities of form,” Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, Joseph Frank’s spatiality of literature premise, Henri Bergson’s categories of time, and Eco’s own theoretical reflections on the Middle Ages as a cultural construct in order to support the premise that the novel deploys a spatio-temporal mobility aesthetic. Additionally, it offers textual mobility as a consequence of spatio-temporal aesthetic.