ECO, UMBERTO

born Jan. 5, 1932, Alessandria, Italy Italian literary critic, novelist, and semiotician (student of signs and symbols). After receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Turin (1954), Eco worked as a cultural editor for Italian Radio-Television and also lectured at the University of Turin (195664). He then taught in Florence and Milan and finally, in 1971, assumed a professorial post at the University of Bologna. His initial studies and researches were in aesthetics, his principal work in this area being Opera aperta (1962; rev. ed. 1972, 1976; The Open Work), which suggests that in much modern music, Symbolist verse, and literature of controlled disorder (Franz Kafka, James Joyce) the messages are fundamentally ambiguous and invite the audience to participate more actively in the interpretive and creative process. From this work he went on to explore other areas of communication and semiotics in such volumes as A Theory of Semiotics (1976) and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984), both written in English. Many of his prolific writings in criticism, history, and communication have been translated into various foreign languages. His fantasy novel Il nome della rosa (1981; The Name of the Rose)in story, a murder mystery set in a 14th-century Italian monastery but, in essence, a questioning of truth from theological, philosophical, scholarly, and historical perspectivesbecame an international best-seller. A film version, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, appeared in 1986.