Perspective

Umberto Eco is an academic writer, holding a faculty position as a professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna in Italy. As a semiologist, he is interested in the construction and meaning of signs and how they are used. Language is one of the media used for conveying signs and thus his writing is informed by his educational and linguistic perspective.

Eco states that he writes as partly out of a feeling of duty. He contends that academics in Europe are expected to write a great deal as part of their job, more than American scholars. In addition, he feels that it is part of his job as a citizen to write essays that add to the general conversation on such areas as politics, environment, social movements, etc. He acknowledges that some of these essays may contradict each other; however, it is because they are written in...