उम्बर्तो एको

कृतियाँ

• 1962खुली कृति

  संगीत, साहित्य और कला की आधुनिक कृतियों का अध्ययन जो जानबूझकर अस्पष्ट या अधूरी हैं और व्याख्याता से उन्हें पूरा करने की अपेक्षा करती हैं।

• 1975संकेत-विज्ञान का सिद्धांत

  संहिताओं और चिह्न-उत्पादन का सामान्य सिद्धांत जो अर्थ को सांस्कृतिक इकाइयों और व्याख्येयकों के जाल के रूप में देखता है।

मत

Eco’s philosophical work leads from aesthetics to a general semiotics. Trained in Pareyson’s theory of interpretation, he described in “The Open Work” how modern art builds ambiguity into the work and makes the interpreter a co-author, and he used information theory to describe this openness. In “The Absent Structure” he engaged with structuralism but criticised what he called the “ontological structuralism” of Claude Lévi-Strauss, which treats structures as real features of the mind rather than as models. From Charles S. Peirce he took the interpretant and the idea of unlimited semiosis: a sign is explained by further signs, without a final term. “A Theory of Semiotics” combines a theory of codes with a typology of sign production and criticises the idea that iconic signs simply resemble their objects. “Lector in fabula” (1979) introduced the model reader that a text foresees. From the late 1980s Eco turned against readings in which any meaning counts: in the Tanner Lectures he defended the intention of the text as a limit, while Richard Rorty replied that texts have no inner nature and that interpreting is a form of using. In “Kant and the Platypus” (1997) Eco returned to perception and reference and qualified the strong conventionalism of his earlier semiotics. His essays on mass culture and the essay “Ur-Fascism” (1995), which described fascism by fourteen typical features linked by family resemblance rather than by a definition, made him a public intellectual in Italy and beyond.

जीवन और संदर्भ

Umberto Eco was born on 5 January 1932 in Alessandria in Piedmont. He studied philosophy at the University of Turin under Luigi Pareyson and graduated in 1954 with a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, published in 1956. From 1954 he worked for the cultural programmes of the Italian broadcaster RAI and from 1959 as an editor at the publishing house Bompiani in Milan; he belonged to the literary neo-avant-garde Gruppo 63. After teaching in Turin, Milan and Florence he moved to the University of Bologna in 1971, where he held a chair of semiotics from 1975 and founded the journal VS (Versus). “The Open Work” (1962) and the essays on mass culture in “Apocalittici e integrati” (1964) made him known; “The Absent Structure” (1968) and “A Theory of Semiotics” (1975) set out his theory of signs. His first novel, “The Name of the Rose” (1980), won the Premio Strega and became an international success; “Foucault’s Pendulum” (1988) and other novels followed. In 1990 he gave the Tanner Lectures in Cambridge, published with responses as “Interpretation and Overinterpretation” (1992). He died in Milan on 19 February 2016.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• The Open Work (Opera aperta, 1962)
• The Absent Structure (La struttura assente, 1968)
• A Theory of Semiotics (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975; English 1976)
• The Role of the Reader (Lector in fabula, 1979)
• The Limits of Interpretation (I limiti dell’interpretazione, 1990)
• Kant and the Platypus (Kant e l’ornitorinco, 1997)