ABOUT ECO'S LEGACY

Umberto Eco is probably best known by a popular audience for his first novel, The Name of the Rose, which was published in Italian in 1980 and in English in 1983 with numerous subsequent editions.

Eco's first venture as a novelist became an international bestseller and an unlikely publishing phenomenon for a popular audience because of its dense references to medieval religion and philosophy as well as numerous passages of untranslated Latin, French, and German. Despite these difficult challenges, however, The Name of the Rose became an international bestseller that has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.

The phenomenal popularity of The Name of the Rose led to a film version in 1986 starring Sean Connery, F. Murray Abraham, and Christian Slater. For those who have only seen the movie, I would highly recommend reading the book for its more detailed character portraits and intellectually engaging immersion in the intriguing mysteries of the monastery and the labyrinth.

The huge popular readership of Eco's first novel generated such a volume of letters to Eco about its meaning that he responded in 1983 with the Postscript to The Name of the Rose that has since been included in subsequent editions of the novel.

In addition, readers' persistent requests for translations of the numerous passages in Latin, French, and German, as well as a guide to the historical figures and the religious and philosophical controversies in the novel also led to the publication in 1999 of The Key to "The Name of the Rose" by Adele Haft, Jane White, and Robert White, classical scholars from Hunter College of the City University of New York.

Although very much a latecomer as a novelist at age 48, Eco went on to write six more novels over a period of 35 years that were published in English as follows:

1989

2001

1995

2005

2011

2015

ECO'S NON-FICTION WORKS

Since Eco was a latecomer at age 48 as a popular novelist, what was he doing before then?

What follows is a broad overview of some of the main areas of focus that Eco pursued beginning in 1956 through his numerous non-fiction works for both an academic and a popular audience.

Eco is best known initially for his foundations as a scholar of the Middle Ages.

Eco's first published work in 1956 arose from his university focus on the medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. After the immense popularity of Eco's first novel, an English version came out in 1988.

In his second publication in 1958, Eco pursued a further focus on the conception of beauty in the Middle Ages which he carried forward in his later turn to modern society.

Eco's reputation as a scholar of contemporary culture was established through his involvement with the Italian Neo-avant-garde in the early Fifties and its response to the problem of the impact of popular culture:

Eco's concept of the intentional ambiguity and "openness" of contemporary art that calls on the audience as an interpretative participant in generating its meaning was published in 1962 (a revised version in English was published in 1989). Eco's idea of the "open work" became the slogan for the Italian Neo-avant-garde.

Eco's analysis of the two opposite modes of response by intellectual's to the problem of popular culture--the "Apocalyptics" total rejection and the "Integrateds" critical acceptance--followed in 1964 (a partial English version, Apocalypse Postponed, in 1994). Those ideas also were adopted broadly by Italian intellectuals.

Besides his beginnings as a medievalist and his later turn to the Italian Neo-avant-garde and the analysis of popular culture, Eco became internationally recognized by the academic world as a prominent leader in the development of the relatively new field of semiotics, the study of our fundamental relation to the world through language, and more broadly through all aspects of culture, that was set out in his A Theory of Semiotics in 1975 (in English in 1976).

The field of semiotics came about initially through the contributions of two prominent pioneers from the late 19th century, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Sausure (1857-1913) and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Saussure was attempting to radically reform our understanding of the way that language generates meaning, and Peirce was attempting to radically reform philosophy as an approach to understanding the human condition. Eco established the first academic program in the field of semiotics at the University of Bologna in 1975 and contributed extensively to the field over his career.

After his turn to semiotics, Eco pursued a focus on the ways and limits of our interpretation of literary works. He was a major contributor to the emerging field of "reader response theory" that explores how the reader is always actively involved in generating the meaning of a work.

Some of these efforts are reflected in The Role of the Reader from 1979 in which Eco drew upon experiments conducted with university students that demonstrated how readers are always actively engaged in filling in gaps in readings in order to make them meaningful.

In the same year, If on a winter's night a traveler, a fictional approach to the role of the reader came out by another internationally famous Italian intellectual, Italo Calvino (1923-1985), who had been an important influence and mentor to Eco from the beginning of his academic career.

An especially accessible work for a popular audience on Eco's ideas about the relation between readers and literary works can be found in his fairly short book entitled Six Walks in the Fictional Woods from 1994. The "six walks" were drawn from his six lectures as the guest speaker for the highly prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University. These lectures provide a fascinating perspective on the relation between fictional worlds and "real" worlds and how we interpret our place and meaning in the world through stories.

Besides his novels, Eco wrote extensively throughout his career on various aspects of contemporary culture for a popular audience. Some of these essays were collected and translated into English in Travels in Hyperreality which was published in 1983. In the essay of the same title, Eco discusses his travels through the United States early in his career when he visited, among other sites, the numerous wax museums that he found at tourist locations throughout the country. This essay provides an interesting example of how Eco explored aspects of popular culture that previously would not have been considered appropriate for an academic scholar, and how he writes about these aspects of popular culture in an accessible way for a broad popular audience.

Another example of Eco's unique role as a "public intellectual" can be found in his light-hearted, humorous articles that he contributed over the long span of his career to Italian newspapers and magazines, most prominently the magazine L'Espresso, on aspects of everyday life such as cell phones, pop songs, blue jeans, the internet, home appliances, etc. Some of these brief articles were collected for an English translation in 1988 entitled How to Travel with a Salmon and Other Essays.

Although seemingly a radical break from his academic pursuits, these articles are actually an important extension of his approach to semiotics as a theory of culture in which all aspects of human expression from the elite to the popular are worthy of consideration and analysis because of their impact on forming our existence as humans.