Umberto Eco

Source

• Born: 5 January 1932
• Birthplace: Allesandria, Italy
• Best Known As: Author of The Name of the Rose

Before he was a best-selling novelist, Umberto Eco's reputation rested on his academic writings on language and semiotics (the study of symbols). An Italian critic, philosopher and historian specializing in medieval history, Eco's first important book was 1959's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. During the 1960s he taught at several Italian universities and wrote essays for the avant-garde magazine Il Verri. In the '70s he took a position as a professor at the University of Bologna and furthered his reputation with columns, essays and books such as A Theory of Semiotics (1976). In 1980 his first novel, The Name of the Rose, was published and was a surprise bestseller, vaulting Eco to international fame (a 1986 film version starred Sean Connery). Since then he has continued teaching and writing, publishing non-fiction books such as Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984) and popular novels such as Foucault's Pendulum (1988) and Baudolino (2000).

For more information on Umberto Eco, visit Britannica.com.

Umberto Eco (born 1932) is a best-selling author of mystery novels that reflect his many intellectual interests and wide-ranging knowledge of philosophy, literature, medieval history, religion, and politics. His academic work in semiotics, the science of signs by which individuals and cultures communicate, has made important contributions to studies of popular culture as well as to communication science and information theory.

Umberto Eco was born in a small town in northwest Italy, the only son of an accountant. When World War II broke out, his family fled to the country to escape the bombing. There he observed conflicts between the Fascists and the partisans and experienced wartime deprivations that would later become a part of his second novel, Foucault's Pendulum. After the war, he entered the University of Turin to study law, but soon switched to medieval philosophy and literature. Partly as a result of his involvement with Italy's national organization for Catholic youth, he wrote a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas and in 1954 was awarded a doctorate of philosophy.

After graduation, Eco worked for Italian state television as "Editor for Cultural Programs," which gave him an opportunity to observe modern culture as a journalist. He published his first book, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, in 1956 and began lecturing at the University of Turin. Following a brief period of military service, when he pursued further studies in medieval philosophy and aesthetics, he published a second book, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, which established him as a leading medieval scholar. After losing his job, Eco became an editor for Casa Editrice Bompiani, a prominent publisher in Milan, and began writing a monthly column of parodies for an avant-garde magazine. In 1962 he published The Open Work, which outlined his developing view that because modern art is ambiguous and open to many interpretations, the reader's responses and interpretations are an essential part of any text.

Throughout the 1960s, Eco's academic work began to focus on semiotics, a discipline which holds that all intellectual and cultural activity can be interpreted as systems of signs. He also continued to write for a wide variety of scholarly and popular publications and taught at universities in Florence and Milan while broadening his interests to include the semiotic analysis of non-literary forms such as architecture, movies, and comic books. In 1971 he became the first professor of semiotics at Europe's oldest university, the University of Bologna, and in 1974 he organized the first congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies. At this meeting he summarized his view that semiotics was a "scientific attitude" that he had begun to use in examining subjects as diverse as James Bond, the literature of James Joyce, and revolutionary comic books from China. In 1976 he published a systematic examination of his views in A Theory of Semiotics.

In 1978, however, Eco's career took a dramatic new turn. At a friend's invitation, he decided to write a detective story. He also decided to make it a demonstration of his own literary theories of an "open text" that would provide the reader with almost infinite possibilities for interpretation in the signs and clues the protagonist must decode in order to solve a mystery. Set in a fourteenth-century monastery, The Name of the Rose is the story of a monk who tries to solve several murders while struggling to defend his quest for the truth against church officials. A main theme of the novel is Eco's own love of books, and the solution to the murders ultimately lies in coded manuscripts and secret clues in the abbey's library. Dense with learned references and untranslated Latin, it is both an exhaustively detailed murder mystery and Eco's semiotic metaphor for the reader's own quest to derive meaning on many levels from the signs in a work of art. Its publishers expected to sell no more than 30,000 copies, but the novel became an international bestseller. In 1986 it was made into a film starring Sean Connery and Christian Slater.

Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, is an even more ambitious attempt to incorporate Eco's ideas of the limits of interpretation into a mystery story. Three editors who work for a seedy publisher in contemporary Milan concoct a fake conspiracy theory that the medieval Knights Templar had devised a plan for harnessing all the energy in the universe. With the aid of a computer, they invent an elaborate web of links between the Templars and numerous other figures and events, gradually reinterpreting all of history. Eventually, the editors begin to believe their own fabrications, in the end becoming the victims of their own imagined conspiracy. Published in 1988, this book also became a bestseller, although critical reception was mixed. Clyde Haberman, writing in the New York Times, called it "a kitchen sink of scholarship," while Salmon Rushdie in The Observer called it "mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts." The Vatican's official newspaper denounced it for its "vulgarities," and the Pope condemned Eco as "the mystifier deluxe."

In 1994 Eco published The Island of the Day Before, which pays homage to Robinson Crusoe. It is the story of a seventeenth-century Italian castaway, marooned on a ship in the South Pacific, who recalls fragments of his past as he explores the deserted vessel. That same year he also published The Search for the Perfect Language, an account of historical attempts to reconstruct a primal language, and Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts, in which he describes the "model reader" as "one who plays your game" and accepts the challenge of interpreting complex ideas. In an interview with the Washington Post, Eco declared that he considered it a compliment for his work to be described as difficult: "Only publishers and television people believe that people crave easy experiences."

In recent years Eco has become increasingly involved in debates of how electronic media and computer technologies will affect culture and society. At the International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Science in San Marino in 1994, he organized a seminar on the future of the book that attracted hypermedia experts from around the world. His own observations on the Internet, virtual reality, and hypertext have appeared in Encyclomedia, a CD-ROM history of philosophy that he helped to develop. Recently he has become involved with the Multimedia Arcade, a complex in Bologna offering Internet access, a computer training center, and a public multimedia library.

Eco believes that although the Internet and CD-ROMs will change the way we read and write, the fundamental problem posed by the new media is the sheer volume of unfiltered information. Broadcasting live over the Internet at Columbia University in 1996, he outlined a hope that computer technology will make possible hypertexts which are unlimited and infinite. "We are marching toward a more liberated society in which free creativity will co-exist with textual interpretation," he said, but we will need a "new form of critical competence … "a new kind of educational training, a new wisdom" to cope with the sheer quantity of information.

In spite of advances in hypertext and other means of recombining information electronically, he is optimistic that books as we know them will remain the fundamental currency of language. Writing in The Nation, he asserted that "books still represent the most economical, flexible, wash-and-wear way to transport information at very low cost." Books will remain essential not only for literature but for "any circumstance in which one needs to read carefully, not only to receive information but also to speculate and reflect about it." In his opinion, a device which allows us to invent new texts has nothing to do with our ability to interpret pre-existing texts.

Eco is an avid book collector who has apartments in Milan, Bologna, and Paris, as well as a summer home near Rimini. In addition to running the Program for Communication Sciences at the University of Bologna, he travels frequently to speak and teach. He continues to publish scholarly treatises, which number almost two dozen, and to contribute to several foreign and Italian newspapers. He also edits a weekly column for the magazine L'Espresso.

Further Reading

Bondanella, Peter, ed., Dictionary of Italian Literature, Greenwood, 1996.

Bondanella, Peter, Umberto Eco and the Open Text: Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture, Cambridge University, 1997.

Capozzi, Rocco, ed., Reading Eco: An Anthology, Indiana University, 1997.

Civilization, June 1997.

Harper's, January 1995; October 1996.

The Nation, January 6, 1997.

Newsweek, September 29, 1986.

New York Review of Books, February 2, 1995.

New York Times, December 13, 1988; October 11, 1989; December 10, 1989; October 22, 1995; Novemer 28, 1995.

New Yorker, May 24, 1993.

Le Nouvel Observateur, October 17, 1991.

Observer, October 15, 1989.

Time, March 6, 1989.

US News and World Report, November 20, 1989.

Washington Post, December 19, 1993.

Wired, March 1997.

"Biblio Feature," Biblio,http://www.bibliomag.com (April 8, 1998).

"Eco: Internet Will Not Replace Books," Columbia University Record,http://www.columbia.edu/cu/record (April 9, 1998).

"A Conversation on Information," Multimedia Worldinterview,http://www.cudenver.edu (April 9, 1998).

"Umberto Eco," Porta Ludovica,http://www.rpg.net/quail/libyrinth/eco (March 24, 1998).

"Umberto Eco," http://www4.ncsu.edu/eos (April 4, 1998).

Eco, Umberto (1932- ) The well-known Italian author is a prolific and learned writer on the theory of interpretation. He earned his doctorate in 1954 for a thesis on Thomas Aquinas, and the medieval world remains a favourite subject, but alongside a career as a journalist Eco developed an academic niche in the study of signs or semiotics, becoming professor at Bologna in 1971. While sensitive to the position which much postmodern theory accords to the reader, Eco has typically drawn back from an ‘anything-goes’ approach. He has attacked deconstructionism and its happy adoption by writers such as Richard Rorty, in favour of a more ‘contractarian’ relationship between author and reader. Foucault's Pendulum is a long allegory of the dangers of unbridled tendencies to multiply meanings. More academic works include The Limits of Interpretation (1990) and Kant and the Platypus (1997), while historically orientated works include The Search for the Perfect Language (1993). See also reader response theory.

Quotes:

"A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams."

"There is a constant in the average American imagination and taste, for which the past must be preserved and celebrated in full-scale authentic copy; a philosophy of immortality as duplication. It dominates the relation with the self, with the past, not infrequently with the present, always with History and, even, with the European tradition."

"The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad."

"The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it."

"The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, I love you madly, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly."

"I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed."

See more famous quotes by Umberto Eco

For the currency, see Eco (currency).

Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco in May 2005
Full name	Umberto Eco
Born	5 January 1932 (1932-01-05) (age 78) Alessandria, Piedmont, Kingdom of Italy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Semiotics
Main interests	Reader-response criticism
Notable ideas	the "open work" ("opera aperta")
Influenced by Joyce, Borges, Peirce, Kant, Lévi-Strauss, Merleau-Ponty, Adorno, Gramsci, Kafka, Baudelaire, Pareyson, Croce, Conan Doyle

Umberto Eco (born 5 January 1932) is an Italian medievalist, semiotician, philosopher, literary critic and novelist, best known for his novel The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory. Eco is President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, University of Bologna, and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford.^[1] He has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. He was also voted 2nd in Prospect Magazine's 2005 global poll of the world's top 100 intellectuals.^[2] He was voted 14th in 2008.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Works 3 Action in anthropology 4 Novels 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External links 7.1 Media

Biography

Eco was born in the city of Alessandria in the region of Piedmont (northern Italy). His father, Giulio, was an accountant before the government called upon him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna, moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education, and he has made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews.^[3] His family name is supposedly an acronym of ex caelis oblatus (Latin: a gift from the heavens), which was given to his grandfather (a foundling) by a city official.^[4]

His father was the son of a family with thirteen children, and urged Umberto to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin in order to take up medieval philosophy and literature, writing his thesis on Thomas Aquinas and earning his Laurea in philosophy in 1954. During this time, Eco left the Roman Catholic Church after a crisis of faith.^[5] After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956–64). A group of avant-garde artists—painters, musicians, writers—whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63) became an important and influential component in Eco's future writing career. This was especially true after the publication of his first book in 1956, Il problema estetico in San Tommaso, which was an extension of his doctoral thesis. This also marked the beginning of his lecturing career at his alma mater.

In September 1962, he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with whom he has a son and a daughter. He divides his time between an apartment in Milan and a vacation house near Rimini. He has a 30,000 volume library in the former and a 20,000 volume library in the latter.^[6] In 1992-1993 Eco was the Norton professor at Harvard University. On May 23, 2002, Eco received an honorary Doctor of Letters from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Eco is a member of the Italian skeptic organization CICAP.^[7]

Works

Semiotics
General concepts Biosemiotics · Code Computational semiotics Connotation · Decode Denotation · Encode · Lexical Literary semiotics · Modality Representation (arts) · Salience Semeiotic · Semiosis · Semiosphere Semiotic elements & sign classes Sign · Sign relational complex Sign relation · Umwelt · Value
Methods Commutation test Paradigmatic analysis Syntagmatic analysis
Semioticians Charles Peirce · Thomas Sebeok Ferdinand de Saussure Mikhail Bakhtin · Jakob von Uexküll Umberto Eco · Louis Hjelmslev Algirdas Julien Greimas Roman Jakobson · Juri Lotman Roland Barthes · Marcel Danesi John Deely · Roberta Kevelson Eero Tarasti · Kalevi Kull Michael Silverstein
Related topics Structuralism Aestheticization Postmodernity
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In 1959, he published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale, which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medievalism and proved his literary worth to his father. After serving for 18 months in the Italian Army, he left RAI to become, in 1959, non-fiction senior editor of Casa Editrice Bompiani of Milan, a position he would hold until 1975.

Eco's work on medieval aesthetics stressed the distinction between theory and practice. About the Middle Ages, he wrote, there was "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and on the other [hand] the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions" — the two cut off from one another as if by a pane of glass. Eco's work in literary theory has changed focus over time. Initially, he was one of the pioneers of "Reader Response".

During these years, Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, penning many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta ("Open Work"). In Opera aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts that are the most active between mind and society and life (open texts) are the most lively and best — although valuation terminology is not his primary area of focus. Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather, they operate in the context of utterance. So much had been said by I. A. Richards and others, but Eco draws out the implications for literature from this idea. He also extended the axis of meaning from the continually deferred meanings of words in an utterance to a play between expectation and fulfilment of meaning. Eco comes to these positions through study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis (as did theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and Hans-Robert Jauss, on the other). He has also influenced popular culture studies though he did not develop a full-scale theory in this field.

Action in anthropology

Eco co-founded Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici (known as VS in Italian academic jargon), an influential semiotic journal. VS has become an important publication platform for many scholars whose work is related to signs and signification. The journal's foundation and activities have contributed to the growing influence of semiotics as an academic field in its own right, both in Italy and in the rest of Europe.

Most of the well-known European semioticians, among them Umberto Eco, A.J. Greimas, Jean-Marie Floch, Paolo Fabbri, Jacques Fontanille, Claude Zilberberg, Ugo Volli and Patrizia Violi, have published original articles in VS. Articles by younger, less famous scholars dealing with new research perspectives in semiotics also find place in almost every issue of VS.

In 1988, at the University of Bologna, Eco created an unusual program called Anthropology of the West from the perspective of non-Westerners (African and Chinese scholars), as defined by their own criteria. Eco developed this transcultural international network based on the idea of Alain Le Pichon in West Africa. The Bologna program resulted in a first conference in Guangzhou, China, in 1991 entitled "Frontiers of Knowledge." The first event was soon followed by an Itinerant Euro-Chinese seminar on "Misunderstandings in the Quest for the Universal" along the silk trade route from Canton to Beijing. The latter culminated in a book entitled The Unicorn and the Dragon, which discussed the question of the creation of knowledge in China and in Europe. Scholars contributing to this volume were from China, including Tang Yijie, Wang Bin and Yue Dayun), as well as from Europe: (Furio Colombo, Antoine Danchin, Jacques Le Goff, Paolo Fabbri, Alain Rey...)^[8][9]

In 2000 a seminar in Timbuktu (Mali), was followed by another gathering in Bologna to reflect on the conditions of reciprocal knowledge between East and West. This in turn gave rise to a series of conferences in Brussels, Paris, and Goa, culminating in Beijing in 2007. The topics of the Beijing conference were "Order and Disorder","New Concepts of War and Peace", "Human Rights" and "Social Justice and Harmony". Eco presented the opening lecture. The following anthropologists gave presentations: from India (Balveer Arora, Varun Sahni, Rukmini Bhaya Nair); from Africa (Moussa Sow); from Europe (Roland Marti, Maurice Olender); from Korea (Cha Insuk); from China (Huang Ping, Zhao Tinyang). Also on the program were scholars from the domains of law or science: (Antoine Danchin, Ahmed Djebbar, Dieter Grimm).^[10]

Eco's interest in East/West dialogue to facilitate international communication and understanding also correlates with his related interest in the international auxiliary language Esperanto.

Novels

Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with good sales and many translations. His novels often include references to historical figures and texts and his dense, intricate plots tend to take dizzying turns.

Eco employed his education as a medievalist in his novel The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery set in a 14th century monastery. Franciscan friar William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is set to host an important religious debate. Eco is particularly good at translating medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms so that the reader can appreciate their substance without being a theologian. The Name of the Rose was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham and Christian Slater.

One notable fact about this book is that the underlying mystery of the murder is actually borrowed from the "Arabian Nights" - translated from the Arabic by Sir Richard Burton.

The Name of the Rose is a creative and biographical tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, represented in the novel and the film by the blind monk and librarian Jorge of Burgos. Borges, like Jorge, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life.

Foucault's Pendulum (1988), Eco's second novel, has also sold well. In Foucault's Pendulum, three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan, and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.

The Island of the Day Before was Eco's third novel. The book is about a man in the Renaissance marooned on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing on his life and the adventures that brought him to be marooned.

Baudolino, a fourth novel by Eco, was published in 2000. Baudolino is a knight who saves the Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates during the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. Claiming to be an accomplished liar, he confides his history, from his childhood as a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination to his role as adopted son of Emperor Frederic Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags of his ability to swindle and tell tall tales, leaving the historian (and the reader) unsure of just how much of his story was a lie.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana is Eco's fifth novel and is about Iambo Bodoni, an old bookseller specialized in antiques who emerges from a coma with only memories to recover his past. In an interview during 2009 London Book Fair, Eco dismissed the rumors of The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana being his last novel, stating that he is a "young novelist" and may write more novels in the future.^[11]

Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. For instance, the character William of Baskerville is a logically-minded Englishman who is a monk and a detective, and his name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles). Eco cites James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most (Source: 'On Literature').

Bibliography

Main article: Bibliography of Umberto Eco

References

1. ^ [1]
2. ^ Prospect Magazine Home Page http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/
3. ^ Don Bosco in Umberto Eco's latest book N7: News publication for the Salesian community p.4 June 2004
4. ^ A Short Biography of Umberto Eco 22 March 2004
5. ^ Umberto Eco (1932-) - Pseudonym: Dedalus 2003
6. ^ Farndale, Nigel (2005-05-24). "Heavyweight champion". Telegraph.co.uk. The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3642577/Heavyweight-champion.html. Retrieved 2009-10-23. 
7. ^ McMahon, Barbara (October 6, 2005), "No blood, sweat or tears", The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/oct/06/worlddispatch.italy, retrieved July 28, 2009 
8. ^ "A Conversation on Information" Interview with Umberto Eco by Patrick Coppock, February, 1995
9. ^ Ur-Fascism (essay in The New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995)
10. ^ "Vegetal and mineral memory", November 2003. Considers, among other things, encyclopedias
11. ^ Professor Umberto Eco at The London Book Fair Part 1 June 2009

• 'We Like Lists Because We Don't Want to Die', interview by Susanne Beyer and Lothar Gorris.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Umberto Eco

• Official Website
• Porta Ludovica: An extensive Umberto Eco resource.
• The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana Annotation Project, a Wiki
• Umberto Eco at the Internet Movie Database

Media

• Audio: Eco talk at UC Berkeley (1982): "From Aristotle to Sherlock Holmes" (online audio recording)

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Persondata
NAME	Eco, Umberto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Writer and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH	1932-01-05
PLACE OF BIRTH	Alessandria
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

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