“Umberto Eco and Semiotic Theory”

The last pronouncement of Umberto Eco’s fifty year long period of reflection on the processes of cognition and interpretation comes in the form of a novel, La misterosa fiamma della regina Luana. If we were to try and come to a conclusion of sorts on Eco’s progression in his semiotic reflection by considering this narrative work, we would perhaps on the one hand agree with those who have observed a continuity between his first two novels and his theory, and a discontinuity of sorts, or at least an expressive independence of his fiction writing from his theoretical speculation beginning with L’isola. Yet, rather than seeing an internal fracture in his work between Il pendolo di Foucault (1988) and L’isola del giorno prima (1994), that is a six year period in which he supposedly abandoned the idea of drawing a direct connection between his theoretical elaboration and his narrative work, we would like to postulate that as of 1994 Eco has entered a new phase of his reflection, and yet one that we see as organic to a journey that truly started in 1975 with Il trattato di semiotica generale. Many were the reasons that led Umberto Eco to write A Theory of Semiotics; yet, unquestionably, one of his preoccupations was the urgency to elaborate a shared semiotic knowledge, and therefore to define the field, the methods and, most importantly, the disciplinary limits of semiotic inquiry.