  | birth_place = Alessandria, Piedmont, Italy | school_tradition = Semiotics | main_interests = Reader-response criticism | notable_ideas = the &quot;open work&quot; (''&quot;opera aperta&quot;'') | influences = James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Sanders Peirce, Immanuel Kant, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Theodor W. Adorno, Antonio Gramsci, Jean Piaget, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, Luigi Pareyson, Benedetto Croce, Arthur Conan Doyle | influenced = |signature =Umberto_Eco_signature.svg }} '''Umberto Eco''' Knight Grand Cross (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. He has also written academic texts, children's books and many essays. Eco is President of the ''Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici'', University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since November 2010) and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, University of Oxford. Currently (2011), Eco one of the world's best selling authors due to his novel ''The Prague Cemetery''.  == 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.[ Don Bosco in Umberto Eco's latest book] N7: News publication for the Salesian community p.4 June 2004  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.[ A Short Biography of Umberto Eco] 22 March 2004  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 his university studies, Eco stopped believing in God and left the Roman Catholic Church.[ ''A Resounding Eco''] in ''Time'', June 13, 2005 quote: &quot;His new book touches on politics, but also on faith. Raised Catholic, Eco has long since left the church. &quot;Even though I'm still in love with that world, I stopped believing in God in my 20s after my doctoral studies on St. Thomas Aquinas. You could say he miraculously cured me of my faith,&quot;Liukkonen, Petri (2003) ''[ Umberto Eco (1932–) – Pseudonym: Dedalus]''  After this, Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) and also lectured at the University of Turin (1956–1964). 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. 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.  == Works == ===Medieval studies=== In 1959, he published his second book, ''Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale'' (''The Development of Medieval Aesthetics''), which established Eco as a formidable thinker in medievalism and proved his literary worth to his father. After 18 months' military service in the Italian Army, he left RAI in 1959 to become the senior non-fiction editor of the Bompiani publishing house in Milan, a position he occupied until 1975. Eco's work on medieval aesthetics stressed the distinction between theory and practice. About the Middle Ages, he wrote that there was &quot;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&quot;, 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 &quot;Reader Response&quot;.  ===Literary criticism=== During these years, Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the &quot;open&quot; text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published ''Opera aperta'' (''Loose work''). In it, 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. I. A. Richards and others said as much, 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).  ===Studies on mass media and mass culture=== From the late '50s till the late '60s, before his semiotic turn, Eco engaged in studies on mass media and mass culture, which were published in various newspapers and journals.Capozzi (2008) According to some these studies were influential although he did not develop a full-scale theory in this field.  His short 1961 essay ''Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno'' (''Phenomenology of Mike Bongiorno'', on the most popular quiz show host, Mike Bongiorno), received much notoriety among the general public, and has drawn endless questions by journalists in every public appearance by Eco; it was later included in the collection ''Diario minimo'' (1963). His book ''Apocalittici e integrati'' (1964) analyzes the phenomenon of mass communication from a sociological perspective.  In 1967 he gave the influential lecture ''Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare'',Strangelove (2005) pp.104-5 quote: &quot;oft-quoted article&quot; which coined the influential term &quot;semiological guerrilla,&quot; 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 &quot;communications guerrilla warfare&quot; and &quot;cultural guerrilla.&quot;Eco (1967)Bondanella (2005) pp.53, 88-9 The essay was later included in Eco's book ''Faith in Fakes''.  ==Semiotics== 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 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''.  == Action in anthropology == Eco receiving the ''honoris causa'' degree in architecture at the university of [[Reggio Calabria from rector Alessandro Bianchi]]  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 &quot;Frontiers of Knowledge.&quot;  The first event was soon followed by an Itinerant Euro-Chinese seminar on &quot;Misunderstandings in the Quest for the Universal&quot; 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)[ &quot;A Conversation on Information&quot; Interview with Umberto Eco by Patrick Coppock, February, 1995]  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 &quot;Order and Disorder&quot;,&quot;New Concepts of War and Peace&quot;, &quot;Human Rights&quot; and &quot;Social Justice and Harmony&quot;. 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).[ &quot;Vegetal and mineral memory&quot;], November 2003. Considers, among other things, encyclopedias 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 many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history and his dense, intricate plots tend to take dizzying turns. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cites James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.Eco (2006) ''On Literature'' Vintage  Eco employed his education 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, requiring the detective work of the reader to 'solve'. The title is unexplained in the book. As a symbol, the rose is ubiquitous enough to not confer any single meaning.  There is a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in 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.  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''). Several descriptive paragraphs  are transcriptions from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's characterisation of Sherlock Holmes. The underlying mystery of the murder is borrowed from the &quot;Arabian Nights&quot;. ''The Name of the Rose'' was later made into a motion picture starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham and Christian Slater, which employs the plot rather than the philosophical and historical themes from the novel.  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 &quot;The Plan&quot;, 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, set in the seventeenth century, is about a man 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'' 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, through 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'' (2005) is about Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past.  ''The Prague Cemetery'', Eco's 6th 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.”  == Selected bibliography ==    ===Novels=== *''Il nome della rosa'' (1980; English translation: ''The Name of the Rose'', 1983) *''Il pendolo di Foucault'' (1988; English translation: ''Foucault's Pendulum'', 1989) *''L'isola del giorno prima'' (1994; English translation: ''The Island of the Day Before'', 1995) *''Baudolino'' (2000; English translation: ''Baudolino'', 2001) *''La misteriosa fiamma della regina Loana'' (2004; English translation: ''The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana'', 2005) *''Il cimitero di Praga'' (2010; English translation: ''The Prague Cemetery'', 2011)  ===Non-fiction books=== *''Il problema estetico in San Tommaso'' (1956 – English translation: ''The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas'', 1988, Revised) *&quot;Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale&quot;, in ''Momenti e problemi di storia dell'estetica'' (1959 – ''Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages'', 1985) *''Opera aperta'' (1962, rev. 1976 – English translation: ''The Open Work'' (1989) *''Diario Minimo'' (1963 – English translation: ''Misreadings'', 1993) *''Apocalittici e integrati'' (1964 – Partial English translation: ''Apocalypse Postponed'', 1994) *''Le poetiche di Joyce'' (1965 – English translations: ''The Middle Ages of James Joyce'', ''The Aesthetics of Chaosmos'', 1989) *''La Struttura Assente'' (1968 – ''The Absent Structure'') *''Il costume di casa'' (1973 – English translation: ''Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality'', 1986) *''Trattato di semiotica generale'' (1975 – English translation: ''A Theory of Semiotics'', 1976) *''Il Superuomo di massa'' (1976) *''Dalla periferia dell'impero'' (1977) *''Lector in fabula'' (1979) *''The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts'' (1979 – English edition containing essays from ''Opera aperta'', ''Apocalittici e integrati'', ''Forme del contenuto'' (1971),  ''Il Superuomo di massa'', ''Lector in Fabula''). *''Sette anni di desiderio'' (1983) *''Postille al nome della rosa'' (1983 – English translation: ''Postscript to The Name of the Rose'', 1984) *''Semiotica e filosofia del linguaggio'' (1984 – English translation: ''Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language'', 1984) *''De Bibliotheca'' (1986 – in Italian and French) *''I limiti dell'interpretazione'' (1990 – ''The Limits of Interpretation'', 1990) *''Interpretation and Overinterpretation'' (1992 – with R. Rorty, J. Culler, C. Brooke-Rose; edited by S. Collini) *''La ricerca della lingua perfetta nella cultura europea'' (1993 – English translation: ''The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe)'', 1995) *''Six Walks in the Fictional Woods'' (1994) *''Incontro – Encounter – Rencontre'' (1996 – in Italian, English, French) *''In cosa crede chi non crede?'' (with Carlo Maria Martini), 1996 – English translation: ''Belief or Nonbelief?: A Dialogue'', 2000) *''Cinque scritti morali'' (1997 – English translation: ''Five Moral Pieces'', 2001) *''Kant e l'ornitorinco'' (1997 – English translation: ''Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition'', 1999) *''Serendipities: Language and Lunacy'' (1998) *''How to Travel with a Salmon &amp; Other Essays'' (1998 – Partial English translation of ''Il secondo diario minimo'', 1994) *''Experiences in Translation'', University of Toronto Press (2000) *''Sulla letteratura'', (2003 – English translation by Martin McLaughlin: ''On Literature'', 2004) *''Mouse or Rat?: Translation as negotiation'' (2003) *''Storia della bellezza'' (2004, co-edited with Girolamo de Michele – English translation: ''History of Beauty''/''On Beauty'', 2004) *''A passo di gambero. Guerre calde e populismo mediatico'' (Bompiani, 2006 – English translation: ''Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism'', 2007, Alastair McEwen) *''Storia della bruttezza'' (Bompiani, 2007 – English translation: ''On Ugliness'', 2007) *''Dall'albero al labirinto: studi storici sul segno e l'interpretazione'' (Bompiani, 2007) *''The Infinity of Lists'' (Rizzoli, 2009) *''Costruire il nemico e altri scritti occasionali'' (Bompiani, 2011) ===Books for children=== (Art by Eugenio Carmi) *''La bomba e il generale'' (1966, Rev. 1988 – English translation: ''The Bomb and the General'') *''I tre cosmonauti'' (1966 – English translation: ''The Three Astronauts'') *''Gli gnomi di Gnu'' (1992 – English translation: ''The Gnomes of Gnu'')   