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Umberto Eco (born January 5, 1932) is an Italian novelist and philosopher, best known for his novels and essays.
Eco was born in Alessandria, in the Italian province of Piedmont. He is an author and semiotician. He works as a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna.
Eco employs his education as a medievalist to good advantage in his novel The Name of the Rose, which was made into a movie staring Sean Connery as a monk who investigates a series of murders revolving around a monastery library. He is particularly good at translating medieval religious controversies and heresies into modern political and economic terms so that the reader can understand them without being a theologian.
Eco's work illustrates the post-modernist literary theory concept of hypertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works and their interpretation.
Selected Bibliography
Novels
- "The Name of the Rose" (Il nome della rosa) (1980) -- A philosophical detective novel in a medieval setting;
- See also "Postscript to 'The Name of the Rose'" for background to the novel.
- A film of this book was made starring Sean Connery, Christian Slater, Ron Perlman, F. Murray Abraham and Michael Lonsdale.
- "Foucault's Pendulum" (Il pendolo di Foucault) (1989) -- A present day conspiracy theory novel;
- "The Island of the Day Before" (L'isola del giorno prima) (1995) -- A novel about a XVII century nobleman marooned across the international date line;
- "Baudolino" (Baudolino) (2001) -- A novel about a young peasant adopted by emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, and his adventures;
Books on philosophy, semiotics, linguistics, aesthetics
(NOTE: For some of these books he is co-author)
- "Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language"
- "The Limits of Interpretation (Advances in Semiotics)"
- "The Role of the Reader : Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts"
- "Interpretation and Overinterpretation"
- "Kant and the Platypus : Essays on Language and Cognition"
- "Serendipities : Language and Lunacy"
- "The Search for the Perfect Language (The Making of Europe)"
- "Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages"
- "The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas"
- "Belief or Nonbelief? : A Dialogue"
Books of his essays
- "Misreadings"
- "Travels in Hyperreality : Essays"
- "How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays"
Books for children
(art by Eugenio Carmi)
- "The Bomb and the General"
- "The Three Astronauts"
Other
Further, Umberto Eco is an expert on the subject of 007, which adds him to the worldwide group of bondologs ("Bondologists," Scandinavian expression for an expert in the field of James Bond).
James Bond related writings:
- Il Caso Bond (aka The Bond Affair ) 1966
- by Del Buono and Umberto Eco
- A collection of essays edited by Umberto Eco.
- Umberto Eco:
- "The Narrative Structure in Fleming" in his The Bond Affair (1966) reprinted in Bernard Waitesr, Tony Bennett and Graham Martin ed. Popular Culture: Past and Present (London: Croom Helm, 1982).