page_title: Umberto Eco
section_title: Influences and themes
hierarchical_section_title: Umberto Eco / Influences and themes
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: timbre du Collège de 'Pataphysique
context_page_description: Umberto Eco OMRI was an Italian medievalist, philosopher, semiotician, cultural critic, political and social commentator, and novelist. 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, and Foucault's Pendulum, his 1988 novel which touches on similar themes.
  Eco wrote prolifically throughout his life, with his output including children's books, translations from French and English, and a twice-monthly newspaper column “La Bustina di Minerva” in the magazine L’Espresso beginning in 1985, with his last column appearing 27 January 2016. At the time of his death, he was an emeritus professor at the University of Bologna, where he taught for much of his life.
context_section_description: A group of avant-garde artists, painters, musicians and writers, whom he had befriended at RAI (Gruppo 63), became an important and influential component in Eco's writing career. 
  In 1971, Eco co-founded Versus: Quaderni di studi semiotici (known as VS among Italian academics), a semiotic journal. VS is used by scholars whose work is related to signs and signification. The journal's foundation and activities have contributed to semiotics as an academic field in its own right, both in Italy and in the rest of Europe. Most of the well-known European semioticians, including Eco, A. J. Greimas, Jean-Marie Floch, and Jacques Fontanille, as well as philosophers and linguists like John Searle and George Lakoff, have published original articles in VS. His work with Serbian and Russian scholars and writers included thought on Milorad Pavić and a meeting with Alexander Genis.
  Beginning in the early 1990s, Eco collaborated with artists and philosophers such as Enrico Baj, Jean Baudrillard, and Donald Kuspit to publish a number of tongue-in-cheek texts on the imaginary science of 'pataphysics.
  Eco's fiction has enjoyed a wide audience around the world, with many translations. His novels are full of subtle, often multilingual, references to literature and history. Eco's work illustrates the concept of intertextuality, or the inter-connectedness of all literary works. Eco cited James Joyce and Jorge Luis Borges as the two modern authors who have influenced his work the most.
caption: Collège de 'Pataphysique, stamp of Satrap Umberto Eco. ByJean-Max Albert Rt, 2001
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