Learn more about the biography of Umberto Eco, italian writer, literary critic, philosopher, seologist and university professor, known for his 1980 novel, Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a mysterious historical novel that combines semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.
Umberto Eco was born on 5 January 1932 in the Piedmont region of northern Italy. His father, Giulio, was an accountant and served in three wars throughout his life. As a child, Umberto moved for hours and hours in his grandfather’s basement. where he began to absorb literature; he read his grandfather’s collection, which included Jules Verne, Marco Polo and Charles Darwin. During Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, Umberto won first prize in a writing contest for young fascists.
- After World War II.
- Eco joined a Catholic youth organization.
- Soon he would become its national leader.
- However.
- He resigned from his post in 1954 during demonstrations against the conservative policies of Pope Pius XII.
- But maintained a strong bond with the Church that was reflected in his doctoral thesis.
- As he had obtained it in philosophy at the University of Turin in 1956.
- With a thesis on Thomas Aquinas.
Eco worked as a cultural editor for the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI). In addition, he was a professor at the University of Turin (1956-1964). During his work at RAI, Eco befriended a group of avant-garde artists. This avant-garde group was known as Gruppo 63, formed by musicians, painters and writers who became a fundamental influence on Umberto Eco’s literary career.
As a seedologist, Umberto Eco interpreted cultures through signs and symbols, analyzed linguistic and religious icons, posters, apparel, musical scores and even cartoons. While teaching at the University of Bologna, he has published more than 20 nonfiction books on these issues.
The uniqueness of his literary work is because he managed to imbue many of his academic concerns in his novels. Echo has found a way to keep his university life and work together as a fiction writer.
The success of O Nome da Rosa, his first novel, has not been repeated in his later works or other works. Nome da Rosa was originally published in Europe in 1980 and has sold more than 10 million copies in about 30 languages. Also a film adaptation in 1986, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Sean Connery, a play that was also a remarkable success.
“I think what we become depends on what our parents teach us in the little moments, when they don’t try to teach us. Are we made of little pieces of wisdom?. -Umberto Eco-
Throughout his life he continued to teach philosophy and, later, semiotics at the University of Bologna, and gained some reputation in Italy, his native country, for his weekly columns on popular and political culture for L?Espresso, the most important magazine in the country.
His contribution to media culture is immense and can be identified through essays such as Fenomenologia di Mike Bongiorno (Phenomenology by Mike Bongiorno). Echo’s influence led him to be widely recognized and, as a result, he was honored with more than 30 honorary doctorates from renowned and respectful institutions, such as Indiana University and Rutgers University.
As mentioned above, his most famous novel, O Nome da Rosa, is set in a 14th-century Italian monastery. The chosen place is the one that best suits the plot presented. An impenetrable monastery, in medieval times, can you almost smell a church, sacred place?In this sacred environment, a tragedy is built; soon the murders begin; monks die at the hands of their followers who try to hide a philosophical treatise lost by Aristotle.
Taking advantage of mystery and fiction, Echo makes way for the debate by inserting entire chapters dedicated to discussions on Christian theology and heresies, an idea that may sound brilliant, but at the same time it is inevitable to think of the controversy that can. Generate.
It’s really smart to turn a work designed for entertainment into something different, turn it into a space for reflection and debate. Against all odds, Echo has managed to captivate a massive audience with this thriller and mystery novel.
In this work, Eco establishes several parallel philosophical conflicts: absolute truth versus individual interpretation; stylized art versus natural beauty; predestination versus free will; and, of course, spirituality versus religion, that is, a series of fundamental dichotomies for the human being, all causing, therefore, a constant dialogue between the traditional world of medieval Christianity and postmodernism, in which Echo manages to examine the limits of each one.
“There is nothing better than imagining other worlds to forget how painful the world we live in is. “Umberto Eco.
His latest novels have several protagonists that have their roots in history, for example: a clairvoyant in the Middle Ages, a castaway of the seventeenth century and a physicist of the nineteenth century; In addition, all these novels have led readers to absorb large doses of semiotic reflections coupled with convincing fiction. Eco has always worked maintaining a strange balance between history, reality and fantasy in literary production.
In September 1962 he married Renate Ramge, a German art teacher with which he had a son and daughter. Eco divided his time between an apartment in Milan and a holiday home near Rimini. He had a 30,000-volume library at his residence in Milan and a 20,000-volume library in Rimini. Echo died at his home in Milan of pancreatic cancer on the night of February 19, 2016, at the age of 84.
In 1988, at the University of Bologna, Eco created an unusual program called Western Anthropology, this program was extremely revolutionary for the time, as it was proposed from the point of view of non-Western researchers (African and Chinese researchers).
Based on this initiative, Eco has developed an international intercultural network in collaboration with the French anthropologist Alain Le Pichon. The Bologna program has given rise to a series of conferences that would be the Baudolino principle, a work in which Echo raises the question of knowledge creation in China. Europe.
In short, the researcher highlighted the widespread tendency to classify symbols, ideas and concepts of foreign cultures, adapting them to the culture system itself. The most significant case cited by Echo is that of Marco Polo, who, seeing a rhino during his travels in the East, immediately identified him as a unicorn. Marco Polo had named the animal after the western image of the unicorn: a creature with horn.
Such anecdotes can be found in medieval texts and first travel books; including the discovery of America, several travelers said they had seen sirens or talked about exotic and fantastic places. Thus, we can see that what Echo was proposing was a consequence of our culture; like Marco Polo, we try to understand something unknown, adapting it to the filter of the known.
Echo had a thought that made him a pioneer in interpreting the world according to our culture, so Umberto Eco founded and developed one of the most important approaches of contemporary semiotics, commonly called interpretive semiotics.