Umberto Eco Biography and List of Works

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 può nascere dalla stressa pietà, dall'eccessivo amor di Dio o della verità, come l'eretico nasce dal santo e l'indemoniato dal veggente. Temi, Adso, i profeti e coloro disposti a morire per la verità, 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 Eugène 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)

FILOSOFI IN LIBERTÁ, (1958)