Eco, Umberto

Eco, Umberto (1932- ), Italian literary scholar noted for his novel Il Nome Della Rosa (The Name of the Rose).

Eco was born in Alessandria, in the region of Piedmont, on January 5, 1932. After studying at the university there he worked for RAI, the state broadcasting company, from 1954 to 1959, and lectured in aesthetics at Turin from 1956 to 1964. He then spent two years teaching at the University of Milan before becoming Professor of Visual Communications at Florence in 1966. There he published his important study La Struttura Assente (1968), which he himself revised and translated as A Theory of Semiotics (1976).

Having spent the years from 1969 to 1971 teaching at the Polytechnic University in Milan, Eco has been Professor of Semiotics at Bologna since 1971 and a visiting professor at several American universities. While his theoretical work on the analysis of signs and meanings has had some influence in academic circles he is more widely known as a newspaper and magazine columnist in Italy and, worldwide, for the novels Il Nome Della Rosa (1980; The Name of the Rose, 1983), a detective story set in a monastery in 1327, and Il Pendolo di Foucault (1988; Foucault's Pendulum), a fantasy about a secret conspiracy of rationalists. Both novels draw on his extensive knowledge of philosophy and literature. He has since published a similarly quirky and philosophical novel, L’Isola del Giorno Prima (1994; The Island of the Day Before, 1995), Baudolino (2000; trans 2002), a picaresque novel set at the time of the Crusades and La Misteriosa Fiamma della Regina Loana (2004; The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, 2005), an illustrated novel about an amnesiac who revisits his childhood home in the hope that the experience will help him recover his memory. He has also written several collections of essays including Travels in Hyperreality (1986) and How to Travel with a Salmon: And Other Essays (1994). In 2003 he wrote Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation, based on a series of lectures on the art of translation. The Name of the Rose was adapted as a film (1986) by the French director Jean-Jacques Annaud. In 1993 he was awarded the Legion of Honour.