Semiotician whose Name of the Rose went global
Umberto Eco (1932–2016)—medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist—reached English readers mainly through The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery laced with signs theory. Born in fascist-era Alessandria, Piedmont, he wrote children’s books, translations, and a long L’Espresso column, La Bustina di Minerva, from 1985.
Late in life he came to believe his surname was an acronym for ex caelis oblatus, a gift from the heavens, bestowed by a city-hall clerk on his foundling grandfather. Growing up under fascism, he won a provincial youth writing prize at ten. Against his father's wish that he study law, he entered the University of Turin and in 1954 took his philosophy degree with a thesis on the aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, supervised by Luigi Pareyson.
He then produced cultural programmes for the state broadcaster RAI in Milan, published his first book in 1956 and took 18 months of military service in 1958. The publisher Valentino Bompiani hired him in 1959 to edit a series of new ideas, and that year he published The Development of Medieval Aesthetics. His 1961 essay dissecting the quiz host Mike Bongiorno, written for Pirelli's company magazine, showed his knack for reading mass culture.
In Opera aperta, The Open Work, of 1962, he treated a literary text as an open field of possible meanings, not a single fixed string, and Apocalittici e integrati in 1964 examined mass communication sociologically. Teaching visual communication in Florence from 1965 to 1969, he coined the phrase semiological guerrilla warfare for resisting mainstream media, and his interpretative semiotics took book form in La struttura assente in 1968. He moved to Milan Polytechnic in 1969, to Bologna in 1971, spent 1972 as a Fulbright scholar at Northwestern and taught repeatedly at Yale and Columbia.
The Name of the Rose drew on his medieval expertise: in a fourteenth-century monastery, the Franciscan William of Baskerville and his novice Adso investigate a chain of murders. It was filmed with Sean Connery and F. Murray Abraham, keeping the plot but not the philosophy. Foucault's Pendulum (1988) followed three bored editors who invent a Templar world-domination conspiracy for fun, with consequences they did not intend.
Source: Umberto Eco
