Most Popular Books by Umberto Eco

Presents four theories describing the limits of literary interpretation, challenging "the cancer of uncontrolled interpretation" that diminishes the meaning and the basis of communication. -- Back cover.

A literary prank leads to deadly danger in this "endlessly diverting" intellectual thriller by the author of The Name of the Rose ( Time). Bored with their work, three Milanese book editors cook up an elaborate hoax that connects the medieval Knights Templar with occult groups across the centuries. Becoming obsessed with their own creation, they produce a map indicating the geographical point from which all the powers of the earth can be controlled—a point located in Paris, France, at Foucault''s Pendulum. But in a fateful turn the joke becomes all too real. When occult groups, including Satanists, get wind of the Plan, they go so far as to kill one of the editors in their quest to gain control of the earth. Orchestrating these and other diverse characters into his multilayered semiotic adventure, Umberto Eco has created a superb cerebral entertainment. "An intellectual adventure story...sensational, thrilling, and packed with arcana."— The Washington Post Book World

A self-confessed liar spins a fascinating tale of his life in this "comic and brilliantly baffling" historical novel by the author of The Name of the Rose ( The Guardian, UK). Constantinople, 1204. The Byzantine capital is under siege by the knights of the Fourth Crusade. Amid the carnage and confusion, one Baudolino saves a historian and high court official from certain death at the hands of the crusading warriors—and proceeds to regale him with the fantastical story of his life. Born a simple peasant in northern Italy, Baudolino has two major gifts: a talent for learning languages and a skill in telling lies. As a boy he meets a foreign commander who adopts Baudolino and sends him to the university in Paris, where he makes a number of adventurous friends. Spurred on by myths and their own reveries, they decide to go in search of the legendary priest-king Prester John who is said to rule over a vast kingdom in the East. The kingdom they seek is a phantasmagorical land of strange creatures with eyes on their shoulders and mouths on their stomachs; of eunuchs, unicorns, and lovely maidens. With dazzling digressions, outrageous tricks, extraordinary feeling, and vicarious reflections on our postmodern age, Baudolino is Eco the storyteller at his brilliant best.

To recall his memories, Yambo withdraws to the family home where he searches old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and diaries to relive the story of his generation: Mussolini, Catholic education and guilt, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, and Fred Astaire.

" . . . the greatest contribution to [semiotics] since the pioneering work of C. S. Peirce and Charles Morris." —Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism " . . . draws on philosophy, linguistics, sociology, anthropology and aesthetics and refers to a wide range of scholarship . . . raises many fascinating questions." —Language in Society " . . . a major contribution to the field of semiotic studies." —Robert Scholes, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism " . . . the most significant text on the subject published in the English language that I know of." —Arthur Asa Berger, Journal of Communication Eco''s treatment demonstrates his mastery of the field of semiotics. It focuses on the twin problems of the doctrine of signs—communication and signification—and offers a highly original theory of sign production, including a carefully wrought typology of signs and modes of production.

A "scintillating collection" of essays on Disneyland, medieval times, and much more, from the author of Foucault''s Pendulum (Los Angeles Times). Collected here are some of Umberto Eco''s finest popular essays, recording the incisive and surprisingly entertaining observations of his restless intellectual mind. As the author puts it in the preface to the second edition: "In these pages, I try to interpret and to help others interpret some ''signs.'' These signs are not only words, or images; they can also be forms of social behavior, political acts, artificial landscapes." From Disneyland to holography and wax museums, Eco explores America''s obsession with artificial reality, suggesting that the craft of forgery has in certain cases exceeded reality itself. He examines Western culture''s enduring fascination with the middle ages, proposing that our most pressing modern concerns began in that time. He delves into an array of topics, from sports to media to what he calls the crisis of reason. Throughout these travels—both physical and mental—Eco displays the same wit, learning, and lively intelligence that delighted readers of The Name of the Rose and Foucault''s Pendulum. Translated by William Weaver

This essay collection by the revered public intellectual displays his " profound erudition, lively wit, and passion for ideas of all shapes and sizes" ( Booklist). In these fourteen essays, Umberto Eco examines many of the ideas that have inspired his provocative and illuminating fiction. From the title essay—a disquisition of the notion that every country needs an enemy—he takes readers on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world. His topics range from indignant reviews of James Joyce''s Ulysses by fascist journalists, to an examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas''s notions about the soul of an unborn child, to censorship, violence and WikiLeaks. Here are essays full of passion, curiosity, and probing intellect by one of the world''s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists. "True wit and wisdom coexist with fierce scholarship inside Umberto Eco, a writer who actually knows a thing or two about being truly human." — Buffalo News

Publisher Description

Playful parodies by the author of The Name of the Rose and Foucault''s Pendulum. Here, Eco pokes fun at the oversophisticated, overacademic, and overintellectual, and along the way makes penetrating comments about our modern mass culture and the elitist avant-garde in art in criticism.

The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century. Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas''s conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty--integrity, proportion, and clarity--that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas''s reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas''s views on art and compares his poetics with Dante''s. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas''s aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas''s aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.

A collection of essays from Italian novelist Umberto Eco on a wide range of topics.

The way we create and organize knowledge is the theme of From the Tree to the Labyrinth, a major achievement by one of the world’s foremost thinkers on language and interpretation. Umberto Eco begins by arguing that our familiar system of classification by genus and species derives from the Neo-Platonist idea of a “tree of knowledge.” He then moves to the idea of the dictionary, which—like a tree whose trunk anchors a great hierarchy of branching categories—orders knowledge into a matrix of definitions. In Eco’s view, though, the dictionary is too rigid: it turns knowledge into a closed system. A more flexible organizational scheme is the encyclopedia, which—instead of resembling a tree with finite branches—offers a labyrinth of never-ending pathways. Presenting knowledge as a network of interlinked relationships, the encyclopedia sacrifices humankind’s dream of possessing absolute knowledge, but in compensation we gain the freedom to pursue an infinity of new connections and meanings. Moving effortlessly from analyses of Aristotle and James Joyce to the philosophical difficulties of telling dogs from cats, Eco demonstrates time and again his inimitable ability to bridge ancient, medieval, and modern modes of thought. From the Tree to the Labyrinth is a brilliant illustration of Eco’s longstanding argument that problems of interpretation can be solved only in historical context.

The acclaimed author examines our contemporary world—from technology to politics and pop culture—in this collection of essays written for L''Espresso. Umberto Eco was an international cultural superstar. In this, his last collection, the celebrated essayist and novelist observes the changing world around him with irrepressible curiosity and philosophical insight. He illuminates the contemporary upheaval in ideological values, the crises in politics, and the unbridled individualism that have become the backdrop of our lives—creating a "liquid" society that defies any organizing principle. In these pieces, written for his regular column in the Italian magazine L''Espresso, Eco brings his dazzling erudition and keen sense of the everyday to bear on topics such as being seen, conspiracies, the old and the young, mass media, racism, and good manners. It is "a swan song from one of Europe''s great intellectuals...[Eco] entertains with his intellect, humor, and insatiable curiosity" ( Kirkus Reviews). "An intelligent, intriguing, and often hilariously incisive set of observations on contemporary follies and changing mores." — Publishers Weekly

This book is significant for its concept of "openness"--the artist''s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance--and for its anticipation of two themes of literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interaction between reader and text.

A 17th century Italian nobleman is marooned on an empty ship in this "astonishing intellectual journey" by the author of Foucault''s Pendulum ( San Francisco Chronicle). In the year 1643, a violent storm in the South Pacific leaves Roberto della Griva shipwrecked—on a ship. Swept from the Amaryllis, he has managed to pull himself aboard the Daphne, anchored in the bay of a beautiful island. The ship is fully provisioned, he discovers, but the crew is missing. As Roberto explores the different cabinets in the hold, he looks back on various episodes from his life: Ferrante, his imaginary evil brother; the siege of Casale, that meaningless chess move in the Thirty Years'' War in which he lost his father and his illusions; and the lessons given him on Reasons of State, fencing, the writing of love letters, and blasphemy. In this "intellectually stimulating and dramatically intriguing" novel, Umberto Eco conjures a young dreamer searching for love and meaning; and an old Jesuit who, with his clocks and maps, has plumbed the secrets of longitudes, the four moons of Jupiter, and the Flood ( Chicago Tribune).

In this exhilarating book, we accompany Eco as he explores the intricacies of fictional form and method. Using examples from fairy tales and Flaubert, Poe and Mickey Spillane, Eco draws us in with a novelist’s techniques, making us his collaborators in the creation of his text and in the investigation of some of fiction''s most basic mechanisms.

Brother William''s search for heresy in a 14th-century Italian abbey is interrupted by seven bizarre deaths in seven terrifying days.

This book brings together some of the most distinguished figures currently at work in philosophy, literary theory and criticism to debate the limits of interpretation.

This witty and irreverent collection of essays presents Eco''s playful but unfailingly accurate takes on everything from militarism, computer jargon, Westerns, librarians and bureaucrats to meals on airplanes, Amtrak trains, bad coffee, express mail, fax machines and pornography. "An uncanny combination of the profound and the profane".--San Francisco Chronicle.