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 Italian
literary critic, novelist, semiotican, who gained international
fame with his intellectual detective story IL NOME DELLA ROSA (1980,
The Name of the Rose), a book about books. It extended the use of
semiotics to the fiction, and combined various genres, literary
theory, medieval studies, and biblical exegesis. As a semiotician
Eco is know for his contribution to the theoretical study of signs
encompassing all cultural phenomena. Much of his study, including
A Theory of Semiotics (1976), has been on the development
of a methodology of communication.
"'L'Anticristo puň nascere dalla stressa pietŕ, dall'eccessivo
amor di Dio o della veritŕ, come l'eretico nasce dal santo e l'indemoniato
dal veggente. Temi, Adso, i profeti e coloro disposti a morire
per la veritŕ, ché di solito fan morire moltissimi con loro, spesso
prima di loro, talvolta al posto loro.'"
(from Il nome della rosa)
Umberto Eco was born in Alessandria. He received a doctoral degree
from the University of Turin in 1954 at the age of 22. His thesis
dealt the early philosopher and religious thinker St. Thomas Aquinas.
From 1954 to 1959 he worked in Milan as a cultural editor for RAI,
Italian Radio-Television, also lecturing at the University of Turin
(1956-64). In 1958-59 Eco served in the army. He was a university
teacher in Milan (1964-65) and Florence (1965-69). From 1969 to
1971 he was a teacher at Milan Polytechnic. At the early age of
39 Eco was appointed professor of semiotics at Bologna University
in the north of Italy.
 Eco's
literary career started in late 1950s, when he was a columnist for
Il Verri, writing 'Diario minimo' (1959-61). He was co-founder
of Marcatré (1961) and Quindici (1967), edited Versus
from 1971, and member of editorial board in Semiotica, Degrés,
Text, Structuralist Review, Communication,
Problemi dell'Informazione, and Alfabeta. Eco has
contributed regularly to daily newspapers (Corrire della Sera),
weekly magazines (L'Espresso), and artistic and intellectual
periodicals (Quindici, Il Verri, et al.). His articles
have also appeared in books, such as DIARIO MINIMO (1963), IL COSTUME
DI CASA (1973), DALLA PERIFERIA DELL'IMPERO (1977), and How to
Travel with a Salmon (1992). In these books the reader can enjoy
Eco's playful insights about such topics as militarism, computer
jargon, Westerns, airplane food, librarians, Amtrak trains, bad
coffee, express mail, fax machines, porno films, and football fans.
From 1959 to 1975 Eco was a senior editor of non-fiction at Bompiani
publishers in Milan. From 1979 Eco has been a vice president of
International Association for Semiotic Studies. He founded and edits
the journal of semiotics, VS. Although he has written a number
of essays on mass media and modern culture, he has been always attracted
to the medieval world, and published a study about the development
of medieval aesthetics (1969) and an analysis of the Beato of Leibana's
manuscript (1973). He has received several awards, among them Strega
Prize (1981), Viareggio Prize (1981), Anghiari Prize (1981), Medicis
Prize (1982), McLuhan Teleglobe Prize (1985). He has also honorary
degrees from several universities. Eco is married to Renate Ramge,
a German-born graphic artist, who helped translate IL DENDOLO DI
FOUCAULT into German.
 Eco's
major studies in aesthetics, literature, communication and semiotics
are OPERA APERTA (1962, rev. ed., 1972, 1976), A Theory of Semiotics
(1976), Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984),
The Limits of Interpretation (1991). While taking over many
of the fundamentals of the structuralist theory of Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Roman Jacobson and of the theories of structural linguistics
of Ferdinand de Saussure, Eco drastically differs from them. In
OPERA APERTA (1962, rev. ed. 1972) and LECTOR IN FABULA (1979) he
criticized the view that meaning is the production of a structure,
and saw that the reader uses two main concepts in the process of
interpretative cooperation: the reader inserts in the text the 'possible
worlds' and the 'frames', situations or sequences of action, in
order to complete its meaning.
As an essayist Eco's writings oscillate between 'academic' and
personal reflections. He opposes both the believers of a superior
elitist culture and those whose are so fascinated of mass culture
that they have lost their critical view. Eco has dealt with spy
novels, comic books, serial novels by Dumas or Eugčne Sue, objects
of the popular culture that the traditional critic has ignored.
In 1991 Eco's SGUARDI VENUTI DA LONTANO launched a new discipline,
'reciprocal anthropology' as a result of a convention held in Italy.
The scholars from African and Asian countries observed carefully
Western people, and came to the conclusion that Westerners are barbaric.
One of Eco's theories is that modern art, especially in the forms
of music, poetry and fiction, often expresses deliberately uncertain
messages. This allows the reader or listener to take an active part
in deciding the meaning of a work of art.
"We are frequently misled by a "mass media criticism of mass
media" which is superficial and regularly belated. Mass media
are still repeating that our historical period is and will be
more and more dominated by images. That was the first McLuhan
fallacy, and mass media people have read McLuhan too late. The
present and the forthcoming young generation is and will be a
computer-oriented generation. The main feature of a computer screen
is that it hosts and displays more alphabetic letters than images.
The new generation will be alphabetic and not image oriented.
We are coming back to the Gutenberg Galaxy again, and I am sure
that if McLuhan had survived until the Apple rush to the Silicon
Valley, he would have acknowledged this portentous event."
(Eco in The Future of the Book, ed. by Geoffrey Nunberg, 1996)
In The Search for the Perfect Language (1995) Eco examined
the history of the idea, that there once existed a language, spoken
before the collapse of the Tower of Babel, which perfectly expressed
the essence of all possible things and concepts. Belief or Nonbelief
(2000) is an exchange of letters between Umberto Eco and Carlo Maria
Martini, the Roman Catholic cardinal of Milan.
 Eco's
second novel, IL PENDOLO DI FOUCAULT (1988, Foucault's Pendulum),
encompassed the whole history of mankind. The narrator is a young
philosophy professor, Causabon, who decides with his friends to
make believe the Templarians had elaborated a plan that was going
to lead them to the control of all the energy in the world. The
friends invent a map and place it under Foucault's pendulum in the
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris. The plan leads the friends
to their deaths.
In an interview in 1989 Eco stated, "to write a third novel is
like to write thirty of them, and it doesn't make much sense." However,
in 1995 appeared Eco's new novel L'ISOLA DEL GIORNO PRIMA (The Island
of the Day Before). The protagonist, Roberto della Griva, a seventeenth-century
nobleman, finds himself in the South Pacific stuck upon a mysteriously
abandoned ship after a violent storm. With nothing else to do, Roberto
recalls chapters from his youth, but finally realizes that he isn't
alone. His elusive shipmate turns out to be Father Caspar, who has
unlocked the very secrets of time and distance that Roberto was
supposed to secure. Together Roberto and Caspar attempt to reach
a nearby island.
Il nome della rosa (1980) - The Name of the Rose
- bestseller novel set in the 14th-century Italian abbey where
the power of life and death lies with the Inquisition. William
of Baskerville, accompanied by his novice Adso of Melk, try to
prove that series of murders are not the work of the Devil. They
found that the blind librarian Jorge de Burgos - a homage to the
Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges - is behind the murders:
he protects Aristotle's' missing manuscript about comedy, the
lost second book of Poetics. The abbey library and monastery burns
down in an infernal fire and the manuscript disappears. - The
book was adapted into screen and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud.
The film took place at Klöster Eberbach near Frankfurt, where
time has stood still since 12th-century. The outside was built
on a hill near Rome, the largest exterior set Europe has seen
since the making of Cleopatra. Il nome della rose has been translated
into more than sixteen languages. It won in 1981 two of Italy's
main literary awards: the Premio Viareggio and the Premio Strega.
"In essence, the basic question of philosophy (as of psychoanalysis)
is the same as that of the detective novel: who is guilty? To
know the answer (to think you know) you have to conjecture that
the facts possess a logic - the logic that the guilty party has
imposed on them."
(from Postille a 'Il nome della rosa', transl. by Michael Dibdin,
1993)
Semiotics: the study of signs and symbols of all kinds.
It deals especially with how written or spoken signs relate to
the real world.
For further reading: Umberto Eco by Teresa De Laurentis
(1981); The Key to the Name of the Rose, by A.J. Haft et al. (1987);
Naming the Rose: Eco, Medieval Signs and Modern Theory by Theresa
Coletti (1988); Naming the Rose: Essays on Eco's The Name of the
Rose, ed. by M.T. Inge (1988); Effetto Eco by Francesca Pansa
and Anna Vinci (1990); Il "caso" Eco by Margherita Ganeri (1991);
Umberto Eco by Jules Gritti (1991); Interview with Umberto Eco
by M. Viegnes (1990, in L'Anello Che Non Tienne: Journal of Modern
Literature 2); Pendulum Diary by W. Weaver (1990, in Southwest
Review, 75, 2); Umberto Eco and the Open Text by Peter Bondanella
(1997); Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century,
ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 2); Umberto Eco by Michael
Caesar (1999)
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