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Unit 29: Umberto Eco’s ‘Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage’ (History and War-Background)

European Middle Ages. In 1954, he took a doctorate degree in philosophy, writing a dissertation Notes
that he later published as Il Problema estetico in Tommaso d’Aquino (1956; The Aesthetics of Thomas
Aquinas). Upon graduation Eco edited cultural programs at RAI, an Italian radio and television
network, until 1959, when he began writing “Diario minimo,” a monthly column for a literary
magazine on the politics of popular culture—which he has continued to compose in many
reincarnations for a string of periodicals throughout his career. Meanwhile, in 1956, he launched
a distinguished academic career at his alma mater, the first of several positions at various Italian
and American universities that eventually led him to the University of Bologna, where he has
chaired the semiotics department since 1975. First as a lecturer on aesthetics and architecture, then
later as a professor of visual communications and semiotics, Eco steadily produced a stream of
theoretical writings. With such works as Opera aperta (1962; The Open Work), A Theory of Semiotics
(1975; his first work originally published in English), and Lector in fabula (1979; The Role of the
Reader) Eco drew respect from academicians and cultivated repute among semioticians everywhere.
Hence he primarily appealed to a specialized intellectual audience—until The Name of the Rose
appeared in 1980. By 1983 this internationally acclaimed, best-selling novel had been translated
into more than twenty languages, won several of Europe’s most prestigious literary prizes, and
sold over twenty-five million copies worldwide. In 1986 Jean-Jacques Annaud directed a film
adaptation of The Name of the Rose that starred Sean Connery. By the mid-1980s Eco once again
returned to scholarly pursuits, publishing such works as Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language
(1984), Travels in Hyper Reality (1986), and Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1986), and he contributed
his editorial expertise to several English-language anthologies on semiotic theory as well. Following
the publication of Il Pendolo di Foucault (1988; Foucault’s Pendulum), Eco’s best-selling award-
winning second novel, he lectured extensively on semiotics at a number of prestigious learning
institutions around the globe, some series of which are gathered in Interpretation and
Overinterpretation (1992) and Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994). As translated editions of his
earlier theoretical writings became increasingly available, Eco selected various essays dating from
1985 onwards for Il Limiti dell’interpretazoine (1990; The Limits of Interpretation) and Apocalypse
Postponed (1994), and he issued Misreadings (1993), a translation of a selection of “Diario minimo”
pieces first published in 1963, and Il Secondo diario minimo (1994; How to Travel with a Salmon (1994),
a collection of previously unpublished columns. In these and other later works Eco has tended to
focus on the linguistic dimensions of semiotics, writing the provocative monograph La Ricerca della
lingua perfetta nella cultura europea (The Search for the Perfect Language) in 1993, the novel L’Isola del
giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before) in 1994, and the essay collection Serendipities in 1999.

29.2 Eco’s Major Works
Eco’s writings on semiotic thought, ranging from such seminal studies as The Open Work, A Theory
of Semiotics, and The Role of the Reader to such later works as Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language,
Interpretation and Overinterpretation, The Limits of Interpretation, represent some of the definitive
texts of the discipline, which studies the cultural meanings and production of symbols and signs,
particularly in relation to both natural and artificially constructed languages. In these works Eco
developed the interpretive methods and postulates for semiotic analyses of linguistic cultural
artifacts that he stylistically and thematically incorporated into his own encyclopedic fiction.
Adapting and often parodying the conventions of the detective genre, Eco’s novels illuminate a
procedural affinity between semiotic inquiry and criminal investigation as his protagonists give
interpretations of elaborate systems of cultural “signs” and explanations of metaphysical phenomena
to resolve equally convoluted, ancient mysteries. Cerebral in tone and rife with Latin quotations,
The Name of the Rose is an intricately plotted, literate murder mystery cloaked with multiple
meanings. At once a detective story and a semiotic novel of ideas, the narrative recreates a detailed
account of medieval life, politics, and thought as it traces the murders of several monks in attendance
at an ecclesiastical council at a Benedictine abbey in northern Italy in 1327. When the survivors
enlist Brother William of Baskerville to deduce the mystery, a conflict arises between modern
rationality and humor, represented by the humanistic William, and medieval superstition and
austerity, represented by the Catholic Jorge de Burgos, the elderly blind librarian at the abbey. A

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