Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1994.

From a series of lectures Eco gave at Harvard. His extended metaphor is a lot like Gardner's: reading a text is like getting lost in a forest. Many of the lectures provide readers with a set of notions or tools to help them navigate their ways through said forest. Foremost among these notions is that of the Model Reader, which Eco says every text creates (not, to be clear, every author; which is to say that a Model Reader isn't simply somebody the author has in mind when he writes the book, but more so it's the figure by whom a text intends itself to be received), and which every reader should try—in the act of reading—to become.

This ties into certain other theories I've run across like the erotics of the text, and the way that modernist texts embed within themselves "instructions" if you will on how to read them. Eco's most interesting application of this idea is when he tries to figure out what makes a text a cult favorite.* Turns out "cult" works have a "disjointed" quality to their structures, by which he means that "The Rocky Horror Picture Show [. . .] is the cult movie par excellence precisely because it lacks form, and so can be endlessly deformed and put out of joint" (127). The same, it seems, goes with Hamlet, Casablanca, and The Divine Comedy.

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* Along similar lines, Eco has a great bit in the lecture on story time and story duration about how he was able to, like, systematically decide whether a cinematic work was pornographic or not. It has nothing to do with obscenity or even sex acts. Pornographic works allow everyday actions the exact amount of screen time as is required in life. Or, in other words, "[W]hen in a film two characters take the same time they would in real life to get from A to B, we can be absolutely sure we are dealing with a pornographic film."

Although this might not be the case when A=The Bedroom Door, Clothes On, and B=like, Impromptu Threesome. Or Anal.