Medieval aesthetics and philosophy (1954–1968) After graduating, Eco worked for the state broadcasting station
Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI) in Milan, producing a variety of cultural programming. Following the publication of his first book in 1956, he became an assistant lecturer at his alma mater. In 1958, Eco left RAI and the University of Turin to complete 18 months of compulsory military service in the
Italian Army. In 1959, following his return to university teaching, Eco was approached by
Valentino Bompiani to edit a series on "Idee nuove" (New Ideas) for his
eponymous publishing house in Milan. According to the publisher, he became aware of Eco through his short pamphlet of cartoons and verse
Filosofi in libertà (Philosophers in Freedom, or Liberated Philosophers), which had originally been published in a limited print run of 550 under the
James Joyce-inspired pseudonym Daedalus. That same year, Eco published his second book, ''Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale
(The Development of
Medieval Aesthetics''), a scholarly monograph building on his work on Aquinas. Earning his
libera docenza in aesthetics in 1961, Eco was promoted to the position of lecturer in the same subject in 1963, before leaving the University of Turin to take a position as lecturer in Architecture at the
University of Milan in 1964.
Early writings on semiotics and popular culture (1961–1964) Among his work for a general audience, in 1961 Eco's short essay "Phenomenology of
Mike Bongiorno", a critical analysis of a popular but unrefined quiz show host, appeared as part of a series of articles by Eco on mass media published in the magazine of the tyre manufacturer
Pirelli. In it, Eco observed that "[Bongiorno] does not provoke inferiority complexes, despite presenting himself as an idol, and the public acknowledge him, by being grateful to him and loving him. He represents an ideal that nobody need strive to reach because everyone is already at his level." Receiving notoriety among the general public thanks to widespread media coverage, the essay was later included in the collection (1963). Over this period, Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects. In 1962 he published (translated into English as "The Open Work"). In it, Eco argued that literary texts are fields of meaning, rather than strings of meaning; and that they are understood as open, internally dynamic and psychologically engaged fields. Literature which limits one's potential understanding to a single, unequivocal line, the
closed text, remains the least rewarding, while texts which are the most active between mind, society and life (open texts) are the liveliest and best—although valuation terminology was not his primary focus. Eco came to these positions through the study of language and from semiotics, rather than from psychology or
historical analysis (as did theorists such as
Wolfgang Iser, on the one hand, and
Hans Robert Jauss, on the other). In his 1964 book
Apocalittici e integrati, , Eco continued his exploration of popular culture, analyzing the phenomenon of
mass communication from a
sociological perspective.
Visual communication and semiological guerrilla warfare (1965–1975) From 1965 to 1969, he was Professor of Visual Communications at the
University of Florence, where he gave the influential lecture "Towards a Semiological Guerrilla Warfare", which coined the influential term "semiological guerrilla", and influenced the theorization of guerrilla tactics against mainstream
mass media culture, such as
guerrilla television and
culture jamming. Among the expressions used in the essay are "communications guerrilla warfare" and "cultural guerrilla". The essay was later included in Eco's book
Faith in Fakes. Eco's approach to semiotics is often referred to as "interpretative semiotics". In his first book-length elaboration, his theory appears in
La struttura assente (1968; literally:
The Absent Structure). In 1969 he left to become Professor of Semiotics at
Milan Polytechnic, spending his first year as a visiting professor at
New York University.. Following the publication of
A Theory of Semiotics in 1975
, he was promoted to Professor of Semiotics at the University of Bologna. That same year, Eco stepped down from his position as senior non-fiction editor at Bompiani.
The Name of the Rose and ''Foucault's Pendulum'' (1975–1988) From 1977 to 1978 Eco was a visiting professor at
Yale University and then at
Columbia University. He returned to Yale from 1980 to 1981, and Columbia in 1984. During this time he completed
The Role of the Reader (1979) and
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984). Eco drew on his background as a medievalist in his first novel
The Name of the Rose (1980), a historical mystery set in a 14th-century monastery. Franciscan friar
William of Baskerville, aided by his assistant Adso, a
Benedictine novice, investigates a series of murders at a monastery that is to host an important religious debate. The novel contains many direct or indirect
metatextual references to other sources that require the detective work of the reader to "solve". The title is unexplained in the body of the book, but at the end, there is a Latin verse (). The rose serves as an example of the destiny of all remarkable things. There is a tribute to
Jorge Luis Borges, a major influence on Eco, in the character Jorge of Burgos: Borges, like the blind monk Jorge, lived a celibate life consecrated to his passion for books, and also went blind in later life. The labyrinthine library in
The Name of the Rose also alludes to Borges's short story "
The Library of Babel". William of Baskerville is a logical-minded Englishman who is a friar and a detective. His name evokes both
William of Ockham and
Sherlock Holmes (by way of
The Hound of the Baskervilles); several passages which describe him are strongly reminiscent of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's descriptions of Holmes.
The Name of the Rose was later made into
a motion picture, which follows the plot, though not the philosophical and historical themes of the novel and stars
Sean Connery,
F. Murray Abraham,
Christian Slater and
Ron Perlman and a
made-for-television mini-series. In ''
Foucault's Pendulum'' (1988), three under-employed editors who work for a minor publishing house decide to amuse themselves by inventing a conspiracy theory. Their conspiracy, which they call "The Plan", is about an immense and intricate plot to take over the world by a secret order descended from the
Knights Templar. As the game goes on, the three slowly become obsessed with the details of this plan. The game turns dangerous when outsiders learn of The Plan and believe that the men have really discovered the secret to regaining the lost treasure of the Templars.
Anthropology of the West and The Island of the Day Before (1988–2000) In 1988, Eco founded the Department of
Media Studies at the
University of the Republic of San Marino, and in 1992 he founded the Institute of Communication Disciplines at the University of Bologna, later founding the Higher School for the Study of the Humanities at the same institution. In 1988, at the University of Bologna, Eco created an unusual program called
Anthropology of the West from the perspective of non-Westerners (African and Chinese scholars), as defined by their own criteria. Eco developed this transcultural international network based on the idea of
Alain le Pichon in
West Africa. The Bologna program resulted in the first conference in
Guangzhou, China, in 1991 entitled "Frontiers of Knowledge". The first event was soon followed by an Itinerant Euro-Chinese seminar on "Misunderstandings in the Quest for the Universal" along the silk trade route from
Guangzhou to Beijing. The latter culminated in a book entitled
The Unicorn and the Dragon, which discussed the question of the creation of knowledge in
China and in
Europe. Scholars contributing to this volume were from China, including
Tang Yijie, Wang Bin and Yue Daiyun, as well as from
Europe: Furio Colombo,
Antoine Danchin,
Jacques Le Goff,
Paolo Fabbri and
Alain Rey. Eco published
The Limits of Interpretation in 1990. From 1992 to 1993, Eco was a
visitor at
Harvard, as the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. His
Norton Lectures were subsequently collected and published as
Six Walks in the Fictional Woods by
Harvard University Press in 1994. That same year, Eco published his third novel,
The Island of the Day Before (1994). The book, set in the 17th century, is about a man stranded on a ship within sight of an island which he believes is on the other side of the international date-line. The main character is trapped by his inability to swim and instead spends the bulk of the book reminiscing on his life and the adventures that brought him to be stranded. He returned to semiotics in
Kant and the Platypus in 1997, a book which Eco reputedly warned his fans away from, saying, "This a hard-core book. It's not a page-turner. You have to stay on every page for two weeks with your pencil. In other words, don't buy it if you are not Einstein." From 2001 to 2002, Eco was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor in
Comparative European Literature at
St Anne's College, Oxford. In 2000, a seminar in
Timbuktu was followed up with another gathering in Bologna to reflect on the conditions of reciprocal knowledge between East and West. This, in turn, gave rise to a series of conferences in
Brussels, Paris and
Goa, culminating in
Beijing in 2007. The topics of the Beijing conference were "Order and Disorder", "New Concepts of War and Peace", "Human Rights" and "Social Justice and Harmony". Eco presented the opening lecture. Among those giving presentations were anthropologists Balveer Arora,
Varun Sahni, and
Rukmini Bhaya Nair from India, Moussa Sow from Africa, Roland Marti and
Maurice Olender from Europe, Cha Insuk from
Korea, and Huang Ping and Zhao Tingyang from China. Also on the program were scholars from the fields of law and science including
Antoine Danchin,
Ahmed Djebbar and Dieter Grimm. Eco's interest in east–west dialogue to facilitate international communication and understanding also correlates with his related interest in the international auxiliary language
Esperanto.
Later novels and writing (2000–2016) , Milan 2011
Baudolino was published in 2000. Baudolino is a much-travelled polyglot Piedmontese scholar who saves the Byzantine historian
Niketas Choniates during the sack of Constantinople in the
Fourth Crusade. Claiming to be an accomplished liar, he confides his history, from his childhood as a peasant lad endowed with a vivid imagination, through his role as adopted son of
Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, to his mission to visit the mythical realm of
Prester John. Throughout his retelling, Baudolino brags about his ability to swindle and tell tall tales, leaving the historian (and the reader) unsure of just how much of his story was a lie.
The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (2005) is about
Giambattista Bodoni, an old bookseller specializing in antiques who emerges from a coma with only some memories to recover his past. Bodoni is pressed to make a very difficult choice, one between his past and his future. He must either abandon his past to live his future or regain his past and sacrifice his future. In 2012, Eco and
Jean-Claude Carrière published a book of conversations on the future of information carriers. Eco criticized social networks, saying for example that "Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots."
From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation (2014).
Numero Zero was published in 2015. Set in 1992 and narrated by Colonna, a hack journalist working on a Milan newspaper, it offers a satire of Italy's kickback and bribery culture as well as, among many things, the legacy of
fascism. == Influences and themes ==