{"id":70157,"date":"2016-02-22T12:07:46","date_gmt":"2016-02-22T12:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=70157"},"modified":"2016-02-22T12:07:46","modified_gmt":"2016-02-22T12:07:46","slug":"remembering-umberto-eco","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/02\/remembering-umberto-eco\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Umberto Eco"},"content":{"rendered":"

The influential Italian semiotician, cultural critic, philosopher, essayist, and novelist fused all of his passions into his writing.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Andrea<\/a>

Andrea Comas \/ Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

Umberto Eco, the influential Italian semiotician, cultural critic, philosopher, essayist, and novelist, died at 84<\/a> on Friday [19 Feb 2016]. Bompiani, his Italian publisher, along with local reports confirmed that the widely revered writer and intellectual had been battling cancer.<\/p>\n

The day had already been marked by the loss of Harper Lee<\/a>, a literary giant whose fiction elucidated contemporary racial injustice in America. Eco was no less of a towering figure, one whose work often dealt with the abstract, the historical, and the undecipherable.<\/p>\n

Born in northern Italy in 1932, the son of an accountant and an office worker, Eco\u2019s efforts transcended genres, boundaries, and centuries. Fittingly, he later spent many years teaching<\/a> at the University of Bologna, frequently touted as Europe\u2019s oldest university.<\/p>\n

Eco is perhaps best known for his first novel The Name of the Rose,<\/em> a theological whodunnit set in the 14th<\/sup> century, which was published in 1980. Don\u2019t be dulled by this synopsis: The book sold millions of copies, was translated into dozens of languages, and spawned one mediocre Sean Connery flick<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also not to say he wasn\u2019t an authority on modern pursuits. \u201cDid you know,\u201d Eco once bragged to an interviewer<\/a>, \u201cthat I once published a structural analysis of the archetypal Ian Fleming plot?\u201d<\/p>\n

He was also a sharp-witted columnist, a sharp-elbowed critic, a satirist, and, after a childhood under the rule of Mussolini, a vicious anti-fascist. Eco was also a genius by most accounts; he spoke Italian, French, Spanish, German, and English. And he played the trumpet.<\/p>\n

Writing in The Atlantic<\/em> in 2012, Rebecca Rosen noted Eco\u2019s fondness for lists<\/a>. \u201cWe like lists because we don’t want to die,\u201d he said at the time.<\/p>\n

He felt similarly about laughter, once telling an interviewer<\/a>, \u201cLaughter, and why we laugh, always fascinated me. Man is the only laughing animal because, unlike other animals, we know we have to die. Laughter is a way to tame death, a way not to take our death too seriously, by not taking too seriously our life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theatlantic.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Umberto Eco, the influential Italian semiotician, cultural critic, philosopher, essayist, and novelist, died at 84 on Friday [19 Feb 2016]. Bompiani, his Italian publisher, along with local reports confirmed that the widely revered writer and intellectual had been battling cancer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituaries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}