Reading Eco

'The omnivorous range of his ceaselessly roving intelligence over far-reaching epochs - especially the twelfth to fourteenth centuries of his Latinate mythopoeic imagination - vast spaces, including a chimerical seventeenth century South Pacific, and an astonishing variety of topics, Ancient and Modern, brings to mind Dr. Johnson's couplet that could serve as Eco's motto: 'Let observation with extensive view/Survey mankind, from China to Peru' - Thomas A. Sebeok, from the Foreword. 'Whenever students ask me to give them an idea of what Umberto Eco is 'really' like, in person, I often follow their inquiry with my own question: what do Augustine, R. Bacon, T.Aquinas, Templars, Baroque, TV serials like "Colombo", movies like "Casablanca" and the trilogy of "Indiana Jones"; thinkers like Peirce, Bakhtin, Derrida, Foucault, Popper, and Wittengstein; writers like Dante, Poe, Joyce, Borges, Barthes, Lotman; as well as, aesthetics, philosophy, structuralism, semiotics, deconstruction, mass media, Superman, Conan Doyle, esoteric texts, kabbalah, irony, humor, intertextuality, reading the classics, philosophy, comic strips, computers, techniques of writing, and interpreting signs/texts, architecture, libraries, labyrinths, palimpsests, the art of writing bestsellers, 'global encyclopedia', 'inferential walks', 'open works', and 'model readers, have in common? 'After a few seconds of silence I end up explaining that this is a partial list of authors, topics, theories, and issues that 'Eco' can examine, discuss and joke about, with various degrees of authority' - Rocco Capozzi, from the Preface. Umberto Eco is, quite simply, a genius. He is a renowned medievalist, philosopher, novelist, a popular journalist, and linguist. He is as warm and witty as he is learned. He is probably the best-known academic and novelist in the world today. The goal of this anthology is to examine his ideas of literary semiotics and interpretation as evidenced both in his scholarly work and in his fiction. The contributors include: Thomas A. Sebeok, Rocco Capozzi, Davis Seed, John Deely, Lubomir Dolezel, Susan Petrilli, Irmengard Rauch, Victorino Tejera, Hanna Buczynska-Garewicz, Michael Riffaterre, Paul Perron, Roberta Kevelson, Anna Longoni, Rocco Capozzi, Teresa De Lauretis, David H. Richter, Peter Bondanella, Thomas Coletti, Linda Hutcheon, Lois Parkinson Zamora, Noram Bouchard, and Claudia Miranda. Umberto Eco, best known for his novels, "The Name of the Rose", "Foucault's Pendulum", and "The Island of the Day Before", has also written numerous scholarly books, including "A Theory of Semiotics, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language", "The Limits of Interpretation", and "Apocalypse Postponed", all from Indiana University Press.