Umberto Eco

Early writings on semiotics and popular culture (1961–1964)

Among his work for a general audience, in 1961 Eco's short essay "Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno", a critical analysis of a popular but unrefined quiz show host, appeared as part of a series of articles by Eco on mass media published in the magazine of the tyre manufacturer Pirelli. In it, Eco observed that "[Bongiorno] does not provoke inferiority complexes, despite presenting himself as an idol, and the public acknowledge him, by being grateful to him and loving him. He represents an ideal that nobody need strive to reach because everyone is already at his level." Receiving notoriety among the general public thanks to widespread media coverage, the essay was later included in the collection Diario minimo (1963).

Over this period, Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects. In 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as "The Open Work"). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning; and 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 which are the most active between mind, society and life (open texts) are the liveliest and best—although valuation terminology was not his primary focus. Eco came to these positions through the 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).

In his 1964 book Apocalittici e integrati, lit. 'The Apocalyptic and the Integrated', Eco continued his exploration of popular culture, analyzing the phenomenon of mass communication from a sociological perspective.

Visual communication and semiological guerrilla warfare (1965–1975)

From 1965 to 1969, he was Professor of Visual Communications at the University of Florence, where he gave the influential lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla", and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream mass media culture, such as guerrilla television and culture jamming. Among the expressions used in the essay are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla". The essay was later included in Eco's book Faith in Fakes.

Eco's approach to semiotics is often referred to as "interpretative semiotics". In his first book-length elaboration, his theory appears in La struttura assente (1968; literally: The Absent Structure).

In 1969 he left to become Professor of Semiotics at Milan Polytechnic, spending his first year as a visiting professor at New York University. In 1971 he took up a position as associate professor at the University of Bologna and spent 1972 as a Fulbright scholar at Northwestern University. Following the publication of A Theory of Semiotics in 1975, he was promoted to Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. That same year, Eco stepped down from his position as senior non-fiction editor at Bompiani.

The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum (1975–1988)

From 1977 to 1978 Eco was a visiting professor at Yale University and then at Columbia University. He returned to Yale from 1980 to 1981, and Columbia in 1984. During this time he completed The Role of the Reader (1979) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984).

Eco drew on his background as a medievalist in his first 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 to host an important religious debate. The novel contains many direct or indirect metatextual references to other sources that require the detective work of the reader to "solve". The title is unexplained in the body of the book, but at the end, there is a Latin verse "Stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus" (transl. "the ancient rose remains in name; we hold [only] the bare names."). The rose serves as an example of the destiny of all remarkable things. There is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in the character Jorge of Burgos: Borges, like the blind monk Jorge, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life. The labyrinthine library in The Name of the Rose also alludes to Borges's short story "The Library of Babel". William of Baskerville is a logical-minded Englishman who is a friar and a detective. His name evokes both William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes (by way of The Hound of the Baskervilles); several passages which describe him are strongly reminiscent of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's descriptions of Holmes.

The Name of the Rose was later made into a film of the same name, which follows the plot, though not the philosophical and historical themes, of the novel. The novel was also adapted into a made-for-television mini-series.

In Foucault's Pendulum (1988), 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.

Anthropology of the West and The Island of the Day Before (1988–2000)

In 1988, Eco founded the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Republic of San Marino, and in 1992 he founded the Institute of Communication Disciplines at the University of Bologna, later founding the Higher School for the Study of the Humanities at the same institution.

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 the 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 Guangzhou 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 Daiyun, as well as from Europe: Furio Colombo, Antoine Danchin, Jacques Le Goff, Paolo Fabbri and Alain Rey.

Eco published The Limits of Interpretation in 1990.

From 1992 to 1993, Eco was a visitor at Harvard, as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. His Norton Lectures were subsequently collected and published as Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by Harvard University Press in 1994.

That same year, Eco published his third novel, The Island of the Day Before (1994). The book, set in the 17th century, is about a man stranded 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 stranded.

Eco's 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism", also published as "Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt", received renewed attention in the twenty-first century. In the essay Eco described fascism as a "fuzzy" set of recurring political and cultural traits, and listed fourteen features of what he called "Ur-Fascism" or "Eternal Fascism". The essay was later republished in Italian as a stand-alone volume and included in the English-language collection ''How to Spot a Fascist''.

He returned to semiotics in Kant and the Platypus in 1997, a book which Eco reputedly warned his fans away from, saying, "This a hard-core book. It's not a page-turner. You have to stay on every page for two weeks with your pencil. In other words, don't buy it if you are not Einstein."

From 2001 to 2002, Eco was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in Comparative European Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.

In 2000, a seminar in Timbuktu was followed up with 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. Among those giving presentations were anthropologists Balveer Arora, Varun Sahni, and Rukmini Bhaya Nair from India, Moussa Sow from Africa, Roland Marti and Maurice Olender from Europe, Cha Insuk from Korea, and Huang Ping and Zhao Tingyang from China. Also on the program were scholars from the fields of law and science including Antoine Danchin, Ahmed Djebbar and Dieter Grimm. 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.

Later novels and writing (2000–2016)

Baudolino was published in 2000. Baudolino is a much-travelled polyglot Piedmontese scholar 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, through his role as adopted son of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags about 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 (2005) is about Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past. Bodoni is pressed to make a very difficult choice, one between his past and his future. He must either abandon his past to live his future or regain his past and sacrifice his future.

Eco's Dall'albero al labirinto: Studi storici sul segno e l'interpretazione was published by Bompiani in 2007. Anthony Oldcorn's English translation, From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation, was published by Harvard University Press in 2014.

The Prague Cemetery, Eco's sixth novel, was published in 2010. It is the story of a secret agent who "weaves plots, conspiracies, intrigues and attacks, and helps determine the historical and political fate of the European Continent". The book is a narrative of the rise of Modern-day antisemitism, by way of the Dreyfus affair, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other important 19th-century events which gave rise to hatred and hostility toward the Jewish people.

In 2012, Eco and Jean-Claude Carrière published a book of conversations on the future of information carriers. Eco criticized social networks, saying for example that "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."

Numero Zero was published in 2015. Set in 1992 and narrated by Colonna, a hack journalist working on a Milan newspaper, it offers a satire of Italy's kickback and bribery culture as well as, among many things, the legacy of fascism.

Books for children

(Art by Eugenio Carmi)

La bomba e il generale (1966, Rev. 1988 – English translation: The Bomb and the General Harcourt Children's Books (J); 1st edition (February 1989) ISBN 978-0-15-209700-4)

I tre cosmonauti (1966 – English translation: The Three Cosmonauts Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd; First edition (3 April 1989) ISBN 978-0-436-14094-5)

Gli gnomi di Gnu (1992 – English translation: The Gnomes of Gnu Bompiani; 1. ed edition (1992) ISBN 978-88-452-1885-9)