On the death of Umberto Eco – Umberto Eco: The Thinker on the Stage – Süddeutsche.de

He reconciled the demands of a scholar with the taste of the general public. About an incomparable tracker and philosophical master detective.

Even then, in the early eighties, it bordered on a wonder that a history of ham, which was riddled with such a surfeit of postmodern text theory and profound cultural and historical erudition, could advance to become the world best-seller. At least the reading public was hardly accustomed to the ironic masques of pop literature, as Umberto Eco with “The Name of the Rose”, the “Perfume” successful and more powerful book written next to Patrick Süskind in which formulated the zeitgeist. The hitherto subscribed to larmoyante Innerlichkeitsprosa Gegenwartsliteratur gave Eco a new direction by putting the individual and the universal in another relationship and the history rehabilitated as an echo chamber of reflection on the present.

Here is “The Name the Rose “with its baroque philosophical and philological superstructure basically a meta-novel, a piece of reading material become theory. The work is full of preconditions, full of intertextual relations – and therefore brought anything with the ideal conditions for a blockbuster

Mainly writers, alongside Professor.? It was vice versa

It was not just the irresistible “urge a monk poison” of the time, after all, already 48 years Eco to moved to debut as a novelist. Rather, he wanted to write nothing less than the perfect postmodern novel as ” ‘postscript to, Name of the Rose” performs in – a small, subsequently filed selbstexegetischen ribbon, the Eco 1983 the Italian original of “The Name of the Rose” ( 1980) afterwards sent.

More often you read now, Eco was a writer who taught philosophy and linguistics as a sideline. It was exactly the opposite. Before publication of “The Name of the Rose” was known in the university environment named by relevant works on philosophy of language.

Umberto Eco is dead

Umberto Eco suffered from cancer. According to his family died, the author of the famous book “The Name of the Rose” on Friday night.

(Video: Reuters )

The Italian outpost virulent mindsets

Eco taught at the applicable as left Bologna University semiotics and was influenced by the “linguistic turn” in philosophy on the one hand and the French structuralism on the other hand, something like the Italian outpost of the then fashionable and virulent of thought.

As a theorist, he was a good head for heights free acrobat on the trapeze, the term work. But so effortlessly he knew how to move in the thin air of abstractions – his thoughts flights were always backed by a knowledge of encyclopaedic breadth, as if he were a reborn Renaissance scholar. His universal education gave him, coupled with a lush gushing eloquence, an intellectual nimbleness that one is inclined to call in Latin, there is this type of free-floating, in all directions to verströmenden intellectuals not in other cultures.

The also just deceased Roger Willemsen was the same stroke – and his loss also so particularly painful because, like Umberto Eco was not in the ivory tower at home, but in public discourse. The Public Intellectual Eco intervened, not least as a column writer in the newspaper.

your Forum your thoughts on the death of Umberto Eco: A book of condolences

“the present I only know from television, through the middle ages I have knowledge firsthand.” Umberto Eco was more than a writer. He was an intellectual instance, far beyond Italy’s borders. your forum