Umberto Eco and the Open Text Semiotics, Fiction, Popular Culture

The first comprehensive study in English of Umberto Eco's theories and fictions.

Umberto Eco is Italy's most famous living intellectual, known among academics for his literary and cultural theories, and to an enormous international audience through his novels, The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. Umberto Eco and the Open Text is the first comprehensive study in English of Eco's work. In clear and accessible language, Peter Bondanella considers not only Eco's most famous texts, but also many occasional essays not yet translated into English. Tracing Eco's intellectual development from early studies in medieval aesthetics to seminal works on popular culture, postmodern fiction, and semiotic theory, he shows how Eco's own fiction grows out of his literary and cultural theories. Bondanella cites all texts in English, and provides a full bibliography of works by and about Eco.

1. Umberto Eco's intellectual origins: medieval aesthetics, publishing and mass media; 2. The open work, misreadings, and modernist aesthetics; 3. Cultural theory and popular culture: from structuralism to semiotics; 4. From semiotics to narrative theory in a decade of radical social change; 5. 'To make truth laugh': postmodern theory and practice in The Name of the Rose; 6. Interpretation, overinterpretation, paranoid interpretation, and Foucault's Pendulum; 7. Inferential strolls and narrative shipwrecks: Six Walks and The Island of the Day Before; 8. Conclusion; Bibliography.

This is the first comprehensive study in English of the works of Umberto Eco, Italy's most famous living intellectual and author of The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before. Peter Bondanella traces the developing interests of Eco, arguably the most famous Italian writer since Dante, from medieval aesthetics to semiotics to popular culture, and shows how Eco's own fiction grows out of his literary and cultural theories.