Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco,
(b. Jan. 5, 1932, Alessandria, Italy), Italian
literary critic, novelist, and semiotician
(student of signs and symbols) who became
internationally known for his novel Il nome
della rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose).
After receiving
a Ph.D. from the University of Turin (1954), Eco
worked as a cultural editor for Italian
Radio-Television and also lectured at the
University of Turin (1956–64). He then taught in
Florence and Milan and finally, in 1971, assumed
a professorial post at the University of
Bologna. His initial studies and researches were
in aesthetics, his principal work in this area
being Opera aperta (1962; rev. ed. 1972, 1976;
The Open Work), which suggests that in much
modern music, Symbolist verse, and literature of
controlled disorder (Franz Kafka, James Joyce)
the messages are fundamentally ambiguous and
invite the audience to participate more actively
in the interpretive and creative process. From
this work he went on to explore other areas of
communication and semiotics in such volumes as A
Theory of Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the
Philosophy of Language (1984), both written in
English. Many of his prolific writings in
criticism, history, and communication have been
translated into various foreign languages,
including La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella
cultura europea (1993; The Search for the
Perfect Language) and Kant e l’ornitorinco
(1997; Kant and the Platypus). He edited the
illustrated companion volumes Storia della
bellezza (2004; History of Beauty) and Storia
della bruttezza (2007; On Ugliness), and he
wrote another pictorial book, Vertigine della
lista (2009; The Vertigo of Lists), produced in
conjunction with an exhibition he organized at
the Louvre Museum, in which he investigated the
Western passion for list-making and
accumulation.
The Name of the
Rose—in story, a murder mystery set in a
14th-century Italian monastery but, in essence,
a questioning of “truth” from theological,
philosophical, scholarly, and historical
perspectives—became an international
best-seller. A film version, directed by
Jean-Jacques Annaud, appeared in 1986. Eco
continued to explore the connections between
fantasy and reality in another best-selling
novel, Il pendolo di Foucault (1988; Foucault’s
Pendulum). His subsequent fictional works
include L’isola del giorno prima (1995; The
Island of the Day Before) and the illustrated
novel La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana
(2004; The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana).
