I was at that time a great writer of unaccomplished masterpieces."Įco remained involved with academia, becoming the first professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna in 1971. "It was so tiring that I never finished any of them. "I was a perfectionist and wanted to make them look as though they had been printed, so I wrote them in capital letters and made up title pages, summaries, illustrations," he told The Paris Review in 1988. He had always loved storytelling and as a teenager wrote comic books and fantasy novels. He later defined semiotics as "a philosophy of language." 5, 1932 in Alessandria, a town east of Turin he said the reserved culture there was a source for his "world vision: a skepticism and an aversion to rhetoric." He received a university degree in philosophy from the University of Turin in 1954, beginning his fascination with the Middle Ages and the aesthetics of text. In 2000, when awarding Eco Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Prize for communications, the jury praised his works "of universal distribution and profound effect that are already classics in contemporary thought."Įco was born Jan. His second novel, the 1988 "Foucault’s Pendulum," a byzantine tale of plotting publishers and secret sects also styled as a thriller, was successful, too -though it was so complicated that an annotated guide accompanied it to help the reader follow the plot. But Eco talked about his inspiration with characteristic irony: "I began writing … prodded by a seminal idea: I felt like poisoning a monk." "The Name of the Rose" sold millions of copies, a feat for a narrative filled with partially translated Latin quotes and puzzling musings on the nature of symbols. "The Name of the Rose" transformed him from academic to international celebrity, especially after the medieval thriller set in a monastery was made into a film starring Sean Connery in 1986. The bearded, heavy-set scholar, critic and novelist took on the esoteric theory of semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in language on popular culture icons like James Bond and on the technical languages of the Internet. She could not immediately confirm the cause of death or where he died.Īuthor of a wide range of books, Eco was fascinated with the obscure and the mundane, and his books were both engaging narratives and philosophical and intellectual exercises. Spokeswoman Lori Glazer of Eco’s American publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, told The Associated Press that Eco died Friday at age 84. ROME (AP) - Italian author Umberto Eco, who intrigued, puzzled and delighted readers worldwide with his best-selling historical novel "The Name of the Rose," has died.
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