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Author's popularity: 3
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If you like or dislike this author in general or one or more of their quotes in particular, please give us your feedback by clicking on the icon to vote for, or the icon to vote against them.
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Popularity: 6
Vote: | A book is a fragile creature, it suffers the wear of time, it fears rodents, the elements and clumsy hands. so the librarian protects the books not only against mankind but also against nature and devotes his life to this war with the forces of oblivion. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | A dream is a scripture, and many scriptures are nothing but dreams. |
Popularity: 6
Vote: | Better reality than a dream: if something is real, then it's real and you're not to blame. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I would define the poetic effect as the capacity that a text displays for continuing to generate different readings, without ever being completely consumed. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Nothing gives a fearful man more courage than another's fear. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The comic is the perception of the opposite; humor is the feeling of it. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The ideology of this America wants to establish reassurance through Imitation. But profit defeats ideology, because the consumers want to be thrilled not only by the guarantee of the Good but also by the shudder of the Bad. |
Popularity: 9
Vote: | The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Translation is the art of failure. |
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Biography
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Umberto Eco (born January 5, 1932) is an Italian novelist and philosopher, best known for his novels and essays.
Biography and opus 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's work on medieval aesthetics stressed the distinction between theory and practice. In the middle ages, he wrote, there was "a geometrically rational schema of what beauty ought to be, and on the other [hand] the unmediated life of art with its dialectic of forms and intentions" -- the two cut off from one another as if by a pane of glass.
Eco's work in literary theory has changed focus over time. Initially, he was one of the pioneers of "Reader Response." In Opera Aperta, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning, that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged, fields. Those works of literature that limit potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line are the least rewarding, while those that are most open, most active between mind and society and line, are the most lively (and, although valorizing terminology is not his business, best). Eco emphasizes the fact that words do not have meanings that are simply lexical, but rather operate in the context of utterance. So much had been said by I. A. Richards and others, but Eco draws out the implications for literature from this truth. He also extended the axis of meaning from the continually deferred meanings of words in an utterance to a play between expectation and fulfillment of meaning. Eco comes to these positions through a language study and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or historical analysis (as such theorists as Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and Hans-Robert Jauss, on the other hand, did). He has also influenced popular culture studies though without developing a full-scale theory in this field himself.
Eco employs his education as a medievalist in his novel The Name of the Rose, which was made into a movie starring 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. At the conclusion of that novel, we are left with a monk attempting to reconstruct a library based on scraps and attempting to create meaning by the combination of random pieces of information. This monk is fulfilling the role of a reader.
Although his novels often include references to arcane historical figures and texts and his dense, intricate plots tend to take dizzying turns, he has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with good sales and many translations. Foucault's Pendulum, Eco's second novel, has also sold well. In Foucault's Pendulum, under-employed publishers decide, as a joke, to weave together the juicy bits of all the conspiratorial histories. They pretend to have uncovered the master plot, the ultimate in nefarious schemes. However, their derisive joke is believed by their readers, and they find themselves caught in a reality made by their fiction. As in The Name of the Rose, characters are obsessed with hermeneutics, and in particular the consciously concealed truth. Also, characters are again dealing with the random or the unintended. Eco's characters partially enact literary theory, as they demonstrate the way that meaning is manufactured by consciousness, and how it may be impossible for any human reading to be without meaning. As in semiotics, it is possible that there is an order antecedent to even the consciously random and that any manufactured meaning is true or false only to the degree that it is believed.
Eco's work illustrates the postmodernist literary theory concept of hypertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works and their interpretation.
Honorary doctorates
* University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia, Freie Universität Berlin
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Umberto Eco".
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