Krešimir Purgar Lost on the (Eco’s) Island: Model Reader in the Era of Television The possibilities of Eco’s dialectic of openness In his celebrated work of 1962 The Open Work i at one point Umberto Eco states the following: The tendency toward disorder, characteristic of the poetics of openness, must be understood as tendency toward controlled disorder, toward a circumscribed potential, toward a freedom that is constantly curtailed by the germ of formativity present in any form that wants to remain open to the free choice of the addressee. (64-65) Subsequently, in the introductory part of the study The Role of the Reader ii created almost thirty years later, we come upon the following formulation: “An open text outlines a 'closed' project of its model reader as a component of its structural strategy”. (9) From these two short quotations, separated by a considerable span of time, it is already possible to see the dialectical nature of Eco’s hermeneutic theory, which numerous writers claim is attempting to reconcile, on the one hand, the inviolability of the act of artistic creation with so called “rights of the reader”, and on the other to adapt methods of interpretation to the independent interpretative requirements of author, reader and the work itself. iii The issues involved in interpretation became increasingly complex for Eco, particularly because he was profoundly aware that the media society at the turn of the century was gradually but ineluctably doing away with the difference between the pure work of art and mass culture. iv In order to separate the products of art from cultural production in a broader sense, i.e. in order to demarcate the effect of original text from medialised con-text, Eco attempted to locate authentic artistic experience and accordingly to locate the potential reason for interpretation, along the author-reader axis, creating figures called the model author (autore modello) and model reader (lettore modello). These are the figures of the ideal transmitter of textual content and the ideal recipient of the same content, since, according to Eco, the intention inherent to every work is to find, through its own semiotic strategies, the perfect hermeneutic