Eco, Umberto (1932- )

Italian novelist, critic, and philosopher; author of
Opera aperta (The Open Work) (1962), Trattato di
semiotica generale (A Theory of Semiotics) (1976), and
Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (1984). A
serious scholar of semiotics, Eco examines the use of signs,
both in literary texts and—as in "Travels in Hyperreality" (1991)—in
popular culture. His novels, The Name of the Rose (1980),
Foucault's Pendulum (1988), and The Island of the Day Before
(1994) offer the kind of postmodern entertainment, deliberately open
to re-interpretation at many different levels, that he had proposed in
Apocalittici e integrati (Apocalyptic and Integrated) (1964).