Umberto Eco

Works

• 1962The Open Work

  Studies modern works of music, literature and art that are deliberately ambiguous or unfinished and call on the interpreter to complete them.

• 1975A Theory of Semiotics

  A general theory of codes and of sign production that treats meaning as a network of cultural units and interpretants.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• The Absent Structure (La struttura assente, 1968)
• 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)