Today, The Grandma has been rereading one of her favourite novels, The Name of the Rose, written by the Italian medievalist and philosopher Umberto Eco, who was botn on a day like today in 1932.
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932-19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic and political and social commentator.
In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
Eco wrote prolifically throughout his life, with his output including children's books, translations from French and English, in addition to a twice-monthly newspaper column La Bustina di Minerva (Minerva's Matchbook) in the magazine L'Espresso beginning in 1985, with his last column (a critical appraisal of the Romantic paintings of Francesco Hayez) appearing 27 January 2016. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his life.
Eco was born on 5 January 1932 in the city of Alessandria, in Piedmont in northern Italy, and he attended high school there. His father, Giulio, one of thirteen children, was an accountant before the government called him to serve in three wars. During World War II, Umberto and his mother, Giovanna (Bisio), moved to a small village in the Piedmontese mountainside. Eco received a Salesian education and made references to the order and its founder in his works and interviews.
Umberto's father urged him to become a lawyer, but he entered the University of Turin (UNITO), writing his thesis on the aesthetics of medieval philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas under the supervision of Luigi Pareyson, for which he earned his Laurea degree in philosophy in 1954.
After graduating, Eco worked for the state broadcasting station Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) in Milan, producing a variety of cultural programming. Following the publication of his first book in 1956, he became an assistant lecturer at his alma mater. In 1958, Eco left RAI and the University of Turin to complete 18 months of compulsory military service in the Italian Army.
More information: Open Culture
In 1959, following his return to university teaching, Eco was approached by Valentino Bompiani to edit a series on Idee nuove (New Ideas) for his eponymous publishing house in Milan. According to the publisher, he became aware of Eco through his short pamphlet of cartoons and verse Filosofi in libertà (Philosophers in Freedom, or Liberated Philosophers), which originally been published in a limited print run of 550 under the James Joyce-inspired pseudonym Daedalus.
That same year, Eco published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale (The Development of Medieval Aesthetics), a scholarly monograph building on his work on Aquinas. Earning his libera docenza in aesthetics in 1961, Eco was promoted to the position of Lecturer in the same subject in 1963, before leaving the University of Turin to take a position as lecturer in Architecture at the University of Milan in 1964.
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. His first book length
elaboration his theory appears in La struttura assente (1968; literally:
The Absent Structure).
In 1971 he took up a position as associate professor at the University of Bologna, spending 1972 as a visiting professor 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.
From 1977 to 1978 Eco was a visiting professor in the US, first 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 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.
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.
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 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 published The Limits of Interpretation in 1990.
More information: The Conversation
From 1992 to 1993, Eco was a visiting professor at Harvard University and from 2001 to 2002, at St Anne's College, Oxford.
The Island of the Day Before (1994) was Eco's third novel. 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.
He returned to semiotics in Kant and the Platypus in 1997, a book which Eco himself reputedly warned fans of his novels 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.
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.
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 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.
Eco died at his Milanese home of pancreatic cancer, from which he had been suffering for two years, on the night of 19 February 2016.
From 2008 to the time of his death at the age of 84, he was a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna, where he had taught since 1971.
More information: The Guardian
but to be subjected to inquiry.
When we consider a book,
we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means...
Umberto Eco
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