He was one of the world's leading names in Medieval Aesthetics and Semiotics.
On February 19, 2016, we lost the Italian scientist, writer, writer, critic, and thinker Umberto Eco, who was born in the town of Alessandria near Milan on January 5, 1932. Umberto Eco began his career in the 1950s by directing the cultural programs of the Italian Radio-Television RAI. He was one of the world's leading names in Medieval Aesthetics and Semiotics.
Umberto Eco is a versatile scientist. He is a lecturer at the University of Bologna in Italy, a semiologist, historian, philosopher, esthetician, medievalist, and someone who has done deep research on James Joyce. For this reason, he is known as Dedalus in the intellectual community. The artisanal artist of Greek mythology, Daedalus (Daedalus in Ancient Greek means clever worker) is an architect, sculptor, and versatile artist who makes all kinds of mechanical tools.
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, novelist, cultural critic, and political and social commentator. In English, he is best known for his popular 1980 novel The Name of the Rose, a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory, as well as Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
His first novel, The Name of the Rose, which is one of the contemporary classics he wrote in 1980, was published in numerous editions, translated into many languages, and made into a movie in 1986. 21 years after the publication of the work, the author reconsidered the work and added some sections. The novel takes place in 1327 in a monastery in medieval Italy. The murders were committed in a seven-day period and a Franciscan trying to solve them, former interrogator William, his assistant Adso… The Name of the Rose is a work that is fictionalized in accordance with historical facts. The novel takes you on a short journey to the Middle Ages, a period in which the clergy used their power excessively, scholastic mentality dominated, and conflicts between church-state-sects was experienced… The chain of events surrounding the monastery library and the reflections on religious intolerance in the library greatly affect the audience.
The Name of the Rose is a very important historical work besides detective work. The prohibition of thinking and the strict attitude to innovative ideas apart from religious teachings also have an instructive quality at the point of conflict between state-church-sects. When you consider this feature in the context of today's conditions, you can switch to quite different points.
Eco says that he named the book randomly and that the title had little to do with the content: “The idea of The Name of the Rose came to me almost randomly, and I liked it because the rose is such a meaningful, symbolic object that it almost has no meaning anymore.”
Umberto Eco's second novel, Foucault's Pendulum, published in 1992, is briefly an adventure of unscientific reactionary thought. It is a suspense novel in which intrigue and reality are intertwined, about an imaginary intrigue designed around the world, starting with the dissolution of the Templier sect in the 14th century. The Foucault Pendulum is the product of eight years of study, detailed research, and an expert library of two thousand volumes. The Foucault Pendulum, after which the book is named, is the pendulum mechanism, named after the French physicist Léon Foucault, who proved for the first time experimentally that the Earth rotates around its axis.
In Journey with Salmon, published in 1997, the reader gets to know Eco from a different perspective as a parody writer. It is a book compiled from his satires, parodies, and writings that he wrote in a humorous style, some of which were published between 1959-1992 and were published under the title of Little Diary, and some, as stated in the preface, hidden in his desk drawer.
Umberto Eco chooses Christianity as the subject of his novel Baudolino, which was published in 2003. But he presents the subject not as a teaching, but as a detective novel with an interesting mystery like solving a puzzle. In the novel, Eco tells the life full of adventures of Baudolino, who was born as a child of a farmer family in Alessandria, village where he was born.
In The History of Beauty, published in 2006, he provides precise descriptions of the different aspects of beauty. “What is beauty?” In his book, he gives place to artists and thinkers who are trying to answer such a difficult question.
In his last novel, Number Zero, published in 2015, the reader embarks on a journey to the times of the Second World War and then the Fascist Italian rule. In Roman, the media mogul Commendator Vimercate establishes a newspaper called Tomorrow. But the principal aim of the boss is not the standard publication of the newspaper. He prepares only zero numbers for a year and equips these unpublished copies with information about certain people. Thus, Vimercate plans to open a new path for itself in politics by using the zeros as a tool of blackmail. In other words, the boss is trying to get him an entrance ticket to the political arena. In his novel, Eco explores corrupt journalism, the power of blackmail, and the insights of the leading media. It must sound familiar to us...